As people age, they tend to slow down. They don’t run as fast as they used to run. They take a little longer to recall the names of people they haven’t seen in a while. They might even forget your birthday. All these things are signs of normal aging. If you live long enough, these things will happen to you.
Assuming you can avoid injury or disease, you will still be able to run, albeit slower. That name that wouldn’t come to you when you needed it, will pop into your mind after the opportunity to use it has passed. These declines from what you could easily do in your youth can be annoying, but they are usually not a major problem.
The slowdown of normal aging is not necessarily the precursor to the devastation of dementia. Dementia is a group of symptoms affecting memory, cognition, and social abilities, that are severe enough to interfere with everyday life.
Several different diseases can cause dementia. The leading cause is Alzheimer’s disease, which I discuss in “What REALLY Causes Alzheimer’s Disease.” As I mention in that essay, the jury is still out on which of several possibilities is the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Several factors may be involved.
Aside from Alzheimer’s, the second leading cause of dementia in older people is vascular dementia. Your vasculature is the network of blood vessels that route oxygenated blood to every cell of your body. Without the oxygen and the nutrients conveyed by that blood, cells die, including brain cells. Vascular dementia occurs when the blood vessels that are supposed to carry blood to your brain fail to do their job.
As we age, blood vessels can become constricted or lose their elasticity. Both facts are problematic. Constricted blood vessels cannot carry the amount of blood necessary to oxygenate their target cells. If they lose their elasticity, the pulsing of blood driven by heartbeats is diminished, lessening blood flow. This loss of elasticity is a calcium buildup often called “hardening of the arteries.” As your body tries to increase blood flow to compensate for the loss of elasticity, it raises your blood pressure, which puts you at risk for other problems, such as heart attack and stroke.
Restriction of blood vessels during mid-life may gradually sneak up on a person, due to hardening of the arteries or the accumulation of gunk within those arteries, without the person noticing that anything is amiss. Perhaps ten or twenty years later, decreases in cognitive functioning or memory may announce the arrival of vascular dementia.
What can be done?
The current medical consensus is that nothing can be done to reduce or eliminate damage that has already occurred to your arteries. Recommended is that people make lifestyle changes to slow the accumulation of additional damage. Risk factors for high blood pressure include:
- Lack of exercise
- Overweight
- Unhealthy diet
- Excess salt in diet
- Excess alcohol consumption
- Excess caffeine consumption
- Smoking
- A family history of high blood pressure
- Use of steroid medications
- Being of African or Caribbean descent
If people have a family history of high blood pressure, or are of African or Caribbean descent, there is not much they can do to change that. However, the other risk factors are at least somewhat within a person’s control.
- It’s possible to exercise more than you do now
- It’s possible to lose excess weight
- You can change to a healthier diet
- You can avoid salty foods and retire your saltshaker
- Limit alcoholic beverage drinking
- Limit caffeinated beverage drinking
- Quit smoking
- Avoid steroid medications
Possibly, the medical consensus will change and ways to reverse existing vascular damage will be found. I’m optimistic. In the meantime, anything you do to reduce the risk factors that I just enumerated will increase the chance that you will still be around when that consensus does change.
It’s common for people’s normal blood pressure to rise as they age. This may be due to the body trying to compensate for a decrease in vascular flexibility or the narrowing of vessels due to deposits of foam cells or other substances that accumulate over time. Specifically with respect to vascular dementia, while high blood pressure is known to be harmful for people under age 65, the reverse may be true for people over 80. In the latter case, the higher blood pressure is pushing the blood where it needs to go. This makes prescribing blood pressure meds to octogenarians and nonagenarians problematic. Be on the lookout for additional research on this question and discuss the latest findings with your doctor.
Bio:
Allen G. Taylor is a 30-year veteran of the computer industry and the author of over 30 books, including Develop Microsoft HoloLens Apps Now, Get Fit with Apple Watch, Cruise for Free, SQL For Dummies, 8th Edition, Crystal Reports 2008 For Dummies, Database Development For Dummies, Access Power Programming with VBA, and SQL All-In-One For Dummies, Second Edition. He lectures internationally on astronomy, databases, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He also teaches database development and Crystal Reports through a leading online education provider. For the latest news on Allen’s activities, check out his blog at www.allengtaylor.com or contact him at allen.taylor@ieee.org.