Healthspan and Brain Health

Neil Rerup (00:05.986)
Hi everyone, I’ve Dr. Linda Erkelee and welcome to the Memory Moment. Do you know what brain health is? I mean you hear a lot about it, but what is really involved in brain health? Would you like to start a brain health program? Well, in the next several minutes we’re going to talk about brain health. Let’s start with lifespan, health span.

And brain health. And what do they have to do with each other? Well, lifespan is simply the number of years a person lives. Health span, on the other hand, is the number of years lived without chronic or debilitating disease. This pertains to the quality of life. Now brain health.

According to the World Health Organization, is the state of brain functioning across cognitive, sensory, meaning your five senses, social, emotional, behavioral, and motor domains. This is thinking, walking, talking, perceiving, acting, and relating to others. And this allows people to

Realize their full potential. Now, did you know there is a gap between health span and lifespan? If you look at the slide, the average lifespan for the world is about 73 years. Now it varies from country to country, but on average, health span, the average number of years lived in good health with good quality of life.

Is 64 years. And many of these years with poor health occur at the end of life. So on average, there is a nine year gap between how long people live and the quality of that life. So the last nine years or so of people’s lives may not be of good quality.

Neil Rerup (02:28.056)
Part of this is due to the fact that people are living longer because of advances in healthcare, etc. But sometimes these advances in healthcare don’t necessarily mean better quality of life, although many do, but some of them just mean longer life. Now, what does this have to do with brain health? Well, brain health is very dependent upon health spans.

In fact, brain health is part of health span, so we don’t need just healthy bodies to enjoy quality of life. We also need healthy brains.

Now there is a part of medicine called lifestyle medicine, and this is medicine that deals with lifespan and health span. And in lifestyle style medicine, we have something called the big six. So these are the six pillars of health, and these include stress reduction, physical exercise, avoiding risky substances.

Healthy nutrition, sleep, and being socially connected. All of these are related to improving the health span, but they’re also very much part of brain health.

Neil Rerup (03:58.582)
Now, let’s say you want to put together your own brain health program. Well, you can take from these big six and put something together. Now you can try to make changes in all of these areas, like to try to reduce chronic stress, because chronic stress is bad for the body, but it’s also, we know from research, bad for the brain, especially because of inflammation and other stressors that.

impact the body and the brain when a person is under chronic stress. This is stress that does not go away. We know that physical exercise is associated with both better health, right? Cardiovascular, lung, but also brain health. Avoiding risky substances like limiting alcohol and really limiting if not

staying totally away from drugs. Then there’s nutrition. Nutrition means having a healthy diet and a healthy diet is one that’s comprised mainly of fresh foods, fruits and vegetables, high protein, less meat, red meat, healthy meat or healthy protein, and mostly cutting out

on really limiting processed foods like junk food, like food that comes in a box, like frozen food with lots of additives, but having more fresh food in your diet. Sleep, getting enough sleep and quality sleep is highly important not only to bodily health, but to forming memories and also to keeping the brain free of toxins.

And finally, socially connecting with others is vital to reducing dementia risk. And it’s vital to getting out and working your body, doing things socially, walking with others. So socially being connected is associated with some of these other areas, particularly keeping your body strong, preventing depression, and reducing dementia risk.

Neil Rerup (06:21.282)
Now, let’s say you want to put together a program for yourself for brain health and physical health from these big six. Let’s say you’re a beginner and you haven’t done this before. So what you can do is take from each area. Now take a start out with three. So a three-step brain health program, and let’s add to that, because this is about brain health, let’s add to that a cognitive workout.

So let’s talk first about what is involved in a cognitive workout. Well, we know from research that a number of activities are associated with better brain function and reduced dementia risk. So, what are things that help us stimulate our brain? Well, number one is to keep learning. So, lifelong learning is very important. And remember, it’s the process of learning.

That is stimulating. So it doesn’t really matter what you learn, but type try to keep it fresh, learn new things, and challenge your brain, or we call push the envelope, right? Challenge yourself. Don’t make it so difficult, the new thing that you’re learning, that you get discouraged or overwhelmed, but always push that envelope a little to stretch your efforts. And over time you will stretch your skills.

And improve your skills as well. Other types of functions that or activities that are associated with a better brain function is just stimulating conversation and sharing of ideas. So talk about books and movies and current events. This conversational piece is very important. That also taps into the social piece, right, of the big six. Other factors that are associated with.

reduced dementia risk and better cognition in later life are leisure activities. For example, doing crossword puzzles and sudoku and actually things like dancing, musical activities. And these are all important to boosting brain health as well and again reducing dementia risk.

Neil Rerup (08:47.222)
Now, some specific things that you can try would be, for example, trying to learn a new language. We know that people who are bilingual and multilingual have lower dementia risk. But it’s never too late to learn a new language. Now you may not become fluent because our odds for becoming fluent are better before puberty if we learn a second or third language before puberty. But it doesn’t matter. It is again, it’s the process. And you can still

Get pretty good at learning a new language. And research shows that there are moderate benefits of learning a new language on certain forms of attention, on frontal lobe functions that involve inhibition of behavior, which is important to always prevent yourself, for example, from you know, thinking twice. So inhibition is about thinking twice before you act. our memory, especially working memory, and there’s

Some evidence that I that learning a new language enhances brain connectivity as well. So there’s not a lot of research on learning a language later in life, but what’s out there shows moderate benefits. The other is one of the big six is exercise. So exercise is great for heart health. And because the heart is so intimately connected.

with the brain because of circulation of blood and oxygen. What’s good for the heart is good for the brain. So actual research on the benefits of exercise on cognition show that small but but shows small but meaningful associations with better memory and better word retrieval in older adults. We don’t quite know the dosage of exercise but we know from the World Health Organization

The recommendation for exercise is five days a week of moderate cardio, thirty minutes a day, and then throw in a couple days of weight bearing exercises and balance training.

Neil Rerup (10:58.954)
Other types of activities that are associated with brain health are directly exercises that directly target the brain. So computer brain training, for example. A lot of people say, should I should I get this app right? Should I subscribe to this? And definitely research shows that there are benefits of these computer brain train programs on attention and reasoning in information processing.

processing speed. But what we know from the research is people that are trained on the games get better at the games, right? They get more efficient. especially games that get diff more difficult as you master the levels, right? So they s they adjust to your skill level and they should be getting harder. So we see some benefit from that and we know that people get better over time. What we don’t really see or know very very much about is whether

These benefits translate to, you know, can I keep track of my bills better? Right? Can I remember appointments better? So, do people get better in daily life on activities that involve memory but are not similar to the brain training game? Not a lot of evidence supporting that. But you certainly can get better at the brain training and types of activities that are close to it.

Now, what about doing crossword puzzles and video games and number puzzles? There’s some evidence that these two have small benefits on cognition in older adults. Mind you, there is not a lot of research on this because it’s very difficult to conduct studies specifically, you know, do crossword puzzles work better than this, or do they work better than number puzzles? But we we know there’s evidence that suggests that.

That doing these 3D video games and puzzles do have some cognitive benefits. Now, what about non-computer based brain training? These are tasks that are what we call mnemonics. These are memory tricks that involve association and visual imagery. And these are exercises to support memory or compensate.

Neil Rerup (13:19.608)
For mild age-related cognitive changes. And there’s evidence, these these studies have been around for a long time on this topic. And there’s evidence that brain activity changes when it associated with this training. Generally, the brain works harder to learn something new, but once people get good at using these techniques, they actually see the brain functioning more efficiently. And this is

True in younger adults and in older adults. So, as you can see, there is there’s a lot to choose from to put together your brain training program. But then where do you start? Well, take a look at your life. Where do you have holes in your life? Do you have a healthy diet? Could you improve that? Are you stressed out a lot? Would you like to learn some relaxation techniques or other ways to reduce stress? How’s your sleep?

Are you getting eight hours of sleep a day? That’s what people need even as they get older. Are you socially connected? Right? Do you have friends? Are they good quality friends? Do you feel supported in your life? How’s your diet? And of course, do you exercise? And do you work out your brain? Are you cognitively stimulated? So, my suggestion is to pick if you haven’t done this before, let’s take

A three-step approach to brain health and the cognitive workout. First of all, why? Well, remember, these brain health programs and cognitive workouts can lead to a better physical health and better brain health. Second of all, there’s evidence that suggests that a brain health program can help preserve your cognition, right? Body health, physical health is very closely related to brain health.

We also have evidence that these cognitive workouts can help boost cognitive reserve. Cognitive reserve is essentially what’s in your gas tank as far as mental abilities. And it used to be the thought that, you know, people are born with a certain amount of cognitive reserve, they acquire it early in life and they essentially whittle away at it over the years. But there’s

Neil Rerup (15:44.04)
evidence that suggests that we could actually boost this cognitive reserve in later life through having a healthier brain. Now how do you do this? How do you start a new program? Well choose among the big six. So pick out something that you would like for the big six. On this slide I arbitrarily chose physical exercise, socializing, but include cognitive exercises.

And also be consistent. You want to do these about three to four times per week. If you’re doing a brain train program, you should be doing it about 20 minutes a day, five days a week. Right? We talked about World Health Organization, 150 minutes of mild cardio or moderate cardio a week with some strength training and balance. If you do more intense work,

You don’t need as much. And some of these activities, right, they they also help with the socialization, for example. So if you let’s say you want to cognitively become more stimulated, you join a book club. That’s also going to help you with socializing. So you pick among your your six. I don’t recommend somebody starting who’s starting from scratch.

to try to boost all six because people will get burned out and tired and you have to ease into it so just pick a few things and if you’re already eating a pretty healthy diet you could try to make it a little more healthy right so take a look at what you’re eating if you’re already you know walking three times a week add a fourth day so you can approach it that way as well

And as far as the cognitive stimulation, again, you can try anything from you know reading, talking about the book, taking a class, learning a language, and and let’s say you’re planning a trip to somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Asia, you can you can start to learn a few words of the language, and that would be a great way to boost your

Neil Rerup (18:08.236)
Your cognitive ability exercises with what you’re doing in life, that’s fun and exciting as well. So I hope this was helpful to you. One thing is you don’t have to spend a lot of money doing this. We’re talking about three simple steps to get going. Ease into it, do it for a couple of weeks. If you find you’re able to do this, then kick it up a notch and push that envelope.

Thanks so much for listening today and good luck on your brain health program.