Excerpt from an article:
"Genova, a neuroscientist by training, has spent most of her working life writing fiction about characters with various neurological maladies. Her novel “Still Alice,” from 2007, centered on a Harvard psychology professor who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In “Remember,” her first nonfiction work, Genova assures her readers that only two per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are of the strictly inherited, early-onset kind. For most of us, our chances of developing the disease are highly amenable to interventions, as it takes fifteen to twenty years for the amyloid plaque that is mounting in our brains to reach a tipping point, “triggering a molecular cascade that causes tangles, neuroinflammation, cell death, and pathological forgetting.” What do those interventions look like? Genova’s guidance is backed by current science, but is mostly just parental: exercise, avoid chronic stress, adopt a Mediterranean diet, and enjoy your morning coffee—but not so much as to compromise deep sleep, which is when “your glial cells flush away any metabolic debris that has accumulated in your synapses.”
One of the more interesting studies that Genova cites followed six hundred and seventy-eight elderly nuns over two decades, subjecting them to all manner of physical and cognitive tests. When a nun died, her brain was collected for autopsy. Curiously, a number of the nuns whose brains showed plaques, tangles, and shrinkage exhibited “no behavioral signs” of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers theorized that these nuns had a high degree of “cognitive reserve”; they tended to have more years of formal education, active social lives, and mentally stimulating hobbies. Even as many old neural pathways collapsed, they were paving “new neural roads” and taking detours along as-yet undamaged connections, thereby masking, if not postponing, the onset of the disease. All pretty straightforward. Now all we have to do is build a society in which everyone has the time and resources for adequate sleep, exercise, nutrition, self-care, and a few good hobbies."
