Professor Tim Spector

You know, obviously you've got cancer is one fear, but I think the other really bad one is ending up with dementia because nearly everyone knows somebody with dementia.

Yes.

I'd had, as you know, problems with my brain before.

I'd had a mini stroke back in 2011 and never really worked out the causes of that.

I knew I had some white spots in my brain.

I wanted to see if they were still there, if there were any signs of that.

And at the same time, I wanted to get a checkup to see was I likely to end up like my mother or not?

And did I have the genetic form of the disease?

Was it straightforward Alzheimer's or was it more the vascular type that my mother had?

Well, probably has.

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.