Jonathan Rosenthal

speaker

92 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Jonathan Rosenthal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Working memory: the surprising decline of dementia · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

It turns out that giving kids better education when they're young helps reduce their risks of dementia later in life.

One of the most exciting findings that's come out in recent years has been a really simple intervention and cheap that has this massive impact.

And that is the shingles vaccine.

So there is really good data from these kind of natural experiments where countries have introduced the shingles vaccine to prevent shingles, nothing else.

And usually it's done with a catch-off date for your birthday.

So someone who turned 70 a week before doesn't get the jab, but someone who turns 70 a week after the cut-off date does get the jab.

And we found that there is a 20% reduction in the risk of getting dementia over the following seven years, according to the data that's out there at the moment.

And some of the researchers think it probably extends well beyond that.

So that is a massive effect for such a cheap and simple intervention.

When one comes down to other things like drugs, a lot of the big pharmaceutical companies have been focusing on molecules that go into the brain and try to rip apart those protein tangles that clog up the brains of people with Alzheimer's.

And those have been

pretty disappointing.

The studies have shown that they have some effect, but it's really quite minor.

People get a few months of better cognition at great cost and actually often at great risk.

The really disappointing finding with those drugs is that carriers of the ApoE4 gene that we discussed earlier are more likely to have things like swelling or bleeding on the brain if they take these drugs than other people.

So that's been a disappointment so far.

But researchers are now looking at various other classes of drugs that are meant to do other things.

So GLP-1s for weight loss, there's been a lot of thinking that could have an impact.

The early studies have looked at people who've already got dementia and put them onto those drugs.

and those have been disappointing.

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