Professor Tim Spector

And so, yeah, partly it was motivated out of my medical curiosity and partly for self-interest.

And what did you find?

I went to this specialised clinic in London that does these dementia screens so I know if I had the risk genes for Alzheimer's, which luckily I don't, but I do have bad genes for diabetes and heart disease.

which predispose you to the vascular side of things.

What's vascular dementia?

There's several types of dementia, but the two main ones are Alzheimer's, where you get these protein folds in the brain, you get local inflammation, these protein tangles, and that then causes these damage to the bits of the brain that's a very specific type of dementia.

Then you get more generalized dementia, which is

usually called vascular dementia, where you're just getting clogging up of the arteries supplying the brain, just like you do in the heart, and that knocks off other bits of the brain in a slightly more random way than happens with Alzheimer's, slightly less predictable.

But that accounts for about a third of all dementia is this vascular time.

I'm predisposed to it because after this weird episode in 2011, my blood pressure went up.

So anyone with high blood pressure generally has slightly stiffer arteries than most people, and that impacts the arteries in your brain, so you are slightly more at risk.

And with these diabetes genes that I've got, thanks to my grandmother, I am more at risk of vascular dementia.

And so what I wanted to do was learn about that in order to...

optimize all the things I could do to postpone it or prevent it as much as possible.

I think I saw the brain as a rather distinct organ that was the domain of psychiatry and

perhaps gerontologists who look at dementia, that wasn't really part of the major picture and certainly wasn't within my domain of expertise.

I think I still believe in the Cartesian view of the difference between the mind and the brain, the mind and the body.

these two separate entities and you've got this barrier between them, this blood-brain barrier that was really like an iron curtain.

So I was interested in it, but I didn't realise this huge connection I've now discovered really that has really excited me.

And I think the thing that triggered it was some of our own experiments, which happened a bit by chance.