Dr. Paddy Barrett

Maybe you don't garner the same benefit from a prevention point of view, but maybe you get a substantial increase in your health span in terms of the functional capacity of the things that you can do with the time that you have.

So I would always advocate to actually use those strategies.

And more often than not, what matters for people is how they function in their day to day life.

And this is where exercise becomes really kind of crucial in that domain.

Correct.

Correct, there is.

And so one of the things is that if you actually look at, so dementia in general affects both males and females, but Alzheimer's specifically affects a disproportionate amount of females.

But if you look at aerobic fitness, and there is a study that has followed females for, say, 44 years, the people in the highest aerobic fitness capacity, fitness level, compared to the lowest, had about a 78% reduction in the risk of dementia.

Now, it doesn't mean that if you're fit, you will never get Alzheimer's or dementia.

But what it means is that if you want to really tilt the odds in your favor until such time that maybe the more novel therapies that come about can do a much better job at treating it, that is the strategy to use.

Correct.

The answer is, is aerobically fit.

But the answer is always both.

But the evidence would suggest aerobic is better.

It's real.

And so if you look at those modifiable factors that increase the risk of dementia, hearing loss is very closely related to an increased risk of dementia.

There is some evidence suggests that early intervention with hearing aids actually reduces that.

It's not the strongest of evidence, but again, it's one of those core factors that you can layer in all the reduction strategies.

We know that vaccinations in terms of shingles vaccine in particular has shown about a 20% reduction in dementia, RSV vaccine, flu vaccine.

So this is a completely unexpected finding in the literature here.