Researchers from the Northern California Institute for Research did a study on the association between sedentary lifestyle, cognitive performance and dementia risk. For this study, they followed a group of adults for 25 years and first found that those who practiced the least physical exercise were also those who had the lowest results in cognitive exercises. They also found that people who watched television for at least four hours each day also had low scores on these tests when they reached middle age.
For Kristine Yaffe, professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, these results carry in themselves a message of hope because “it seems likely that people can reduce their risk of decline cognitive and dementia, simply by changing their way of life” declared the doctor during the annual International Conference of the Alzheimer’s Association which is currently being held in Washington (United States).
It was during this same conference that researchers announced than a simple saliva test may one day help detect the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. According to the Association, more than 5 million people are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease in the United States, and 28 million could develop the disease by 2050.
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