That’s the view of Dr. Denise Park, the Director of the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas (USA).

OUR HABITS CAN HAVE PROFOUND EFFECTS on our cognitive functions. There are many contributants to our brain health, but today I want to focus on a relatively simple way you can lower your chances of suffering from cognitive decline.

First, before we talk about too much sitting, let’s quickly list some brain hacks that may lower your risk of suffering from a cognitive decline.

1. Physical activity may provide some protection for many of us. Dr. Laura Baker, a neuropsychologist at the University of Washington (in my beloved Seattle), discovered that older adults with mild cognitive impairment demonstrated improvements on tests of executive function after six months of aerobic exercise (for four days weekly).
2. Stress is associated with an increase in beta-amyloid protein, a component thought by many (but not all) to be a causal agent for Alzheimer’s dementia, at least in mice brains.
3. Mental stimulation. A 2006 meta-analysis showed fewer years of education associated [emphasis added] with a greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
4. Short sleep is associated with brain dysfunction. I have written about the link here:

Short Sleep and DementiaSleep disturbance is associated with a higher risk of dementia.medium.comUse Sleep and Exercise to Drop Your Dementia RiskToo little (or too much) sleep may increase your dementia risk. Optimizing sleep and getting some exercise may reduce…drmichaelhunter.medium.com.

First, full disclosure: I am unaware of any high-level evidence pointing to a clear cause-and-effect relationship between lifestyle interventions and improvements in cognitive impairment risk.

The US National Institutes of Health agrees, with an expert panel concluding that there is not enough evidence to support any particular modifiable factor as reducing dementia risk.

Still, many habits are associated with poorer brain health, and today I want to look specifically at the effects of sitting too much.

Sitting and the brain

“Americans Sit More Than Anytime In History And It’s Killing Us.”

That’s the headline I recently stumbled across. Do you sit too much? In the United States, the average American adult sits more than at any other time in history.

As a radiation oncologist, I have a relatively sedentary job. Do you? According to the American Heart Association, these types of jobs have increased 83 percent since 1950.

We sit. A lot.

Did you know that physically active jobs comprise less than 20 percent of work in the USA? This low number is down from approximately half of jobs in 1960.

And, Johns Hopkins researchers contend that “physically active jobs now make up less than 20% of the U.S. workforce, down from roughly half of jobs in 1960.” The typical office worker sits a remarkable 15 hours daily. And then we sit on our commute home.

And there is this: Too much sitting can offset the health benefits of working out.

All of this sitting can do a job on our brains. A 2018 PLOS One study reports that sitting too much is associated with changes in a brain region central to memory.

University of California, Los Angeles (USA) researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to peer into the brain’s medial temporal lobe (MTL), a zone that creates new memories. The research subjects ranged in age from 45 to 75 years.

They compared the scans with the average number of hours an individual sat each day. Those who sat for the most prolonged time had thinner MTL regions. Unfortunately, such brain changes can be precursors of cognitive decline and dementia.

Sitting and the brain — An action plan

I recommend moving after 30 minutes of sitting to all of my able patients. Many of us have reminders on our wrists: My FitBit device buzzes periodically to remind me to get up and move.

I recall a New York Times piece that suggested we exercise for three minutes every half hour to counter the harmful effects of sitting too long. Walk around the office or home. Climb stairs. Stretch. Just move. Even as few as 15 steps during mini-breaks can improve our blood sugar control.

The post One Simple Way to Protect Your Brain appeared first on Medika Life.

Unfortunately, chronic stress causes our adrenal glands to make too much of the hormone cortisol. When exposed to excessive cortisol, we can experience negative consequences in our brain, immune system, and other organs. More specifically, you may have anxiety, depression, headaches, heart disease, and premature death.The Power of the Mind to Reduce InflammationOUR ANCESTORS EXPERIENCED very different stresses than do we today. Hunter-gatherers may have faced off against a lion…medium.com

Of course, in a perfect world, you would minimize your exposure to chronic stress agents. How can we reduce the harmful effects of chronic stress? Today we explore some history before briefly addressing the effects of mindfulness meditation on markers associated with aging.

History

First, a bit of history. The English word “meditation” stems from meditatum, Latin for “to ponder.” Getting more granular, we turn to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

c. 1200, meditacioun, “contemplation; devout preoccupation; private devotions, prayer,” from Old French meditacion “thought, reflection, study,” and directly from Latin meditationem (nominative meditatio) “a thinking over, meditation,” noun of action from past-participle stem of meditari “to meditate, think over, reflect, consider,” from a frequentative form of PIE root *med- “take appropriate measures.” Meaning “meditative discourse on a subject” is early 14c.; meaning “act of meditating, continuous calm thought upon some subject” is from late 14c. The Latin verb also had stronger senses: “plan, devise, practice, rehearse, study.”

We don’t know when people began to meditate, but the practice likely began thousands of years ago, before the birth of modern civilization.

The earliest written records about meditation are from around 1500 BCE. The mindfulness approach appears to have been an essential element of the earliest forms of Vedic (early Hindu) schools in India.

Meditation practices are a part of many religious traditions worldwide, but I associated it with Buddhism as a formal part of a spiritual path. The Buddha taught in Southeast Asia approximately 2600 years ago, opening the door to future practitioners to sit and breathe their way to peace.

Buddha’s teachings offer that meditative concentration is one of three pieces of training that result in enlightenment. The other two are the wisdom of seeing things as they indeed are and proper ethical conduct.

Modern practice

More recently, a central figure in the promulgation of mindfulness is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. He founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (USA) in 1979. His Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program has “been instrumental in bringing the benefits of mindfulness practice — without any religious overtones — to the public attention and scientific communities worldwide.”

Most relevant to our discussion today is that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction — centered in mindfulness meditation — has evolved to encompass the management of several health disorders. These include anxiety, depression, skin diseases, pain, immune disorders, hypertension, and diabetes.

Does MBSR work? A systemic review of relevant randomized clinical trials answers in the affirmative. The reviewers concluded this:

“Although the research on MBSR is sparse, MBSR appears to improve the condition of patients suffering from chronic illnesses and helps them cope with a wide variety of clinical problems.”

Meditation and aging

But what about aging? Understanding the malleable determinants of cell aging can help us to understand human longevity better. Small pieces of genetic material on the tips of our DNA offer a starting place for understanding the aging process. These protective caps on the ends of our chromosomes are telomeres.One Key to Living LongerI GIVE YOU the most extensive population-based study examining the link between adherence to a Mediterranean diet and…medium.com

Telomere shortening and replicative senescence appear to be indicators of body aging. Researchers examined eleventh studies comparing meditating subjects with individuals in control conditions to determine the effects of mindfulness meditation on telomeres.

The individuals in the meditation groups had longer telomeres than those in control conditions. A more significant number of hours of meditation appeared associated with a more significant impact on telomere biology. This meta-analysis suggests mediation may slow telomere shortening.

My take

Meditation practice may have beneficial effects on telomere regulation, in addition to its known positive effects on anxiety and other health problems. Do you practice some form of mindfulness? I have done Vinyasa flow yoga and, more recently, very much enjoy the simple practice of box breathing. Here’s a short piece I wrote about the practice:Box BreathingLearn the steps of box breathing and discover how it can help relieve anxiety and stress. Watch a GIF that helps you…www.healthline.com

Thank you for joining me.

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In a new longitudinal study, investigators discovered that older adults who sleep less than 4.5 hours or more than 6.5 hours a night report significant cognitive decline over time, but the cognitive scores for those with sleep duration in between the range, remain stable.

The study was published online on the 20th of October this year in the journal Brain, as part of a growing body of research that looks to address if sleep can be used as a marker of Alzheimer’s disease progression. Previous studies have suggested a strong relationship between sleep patterns and Alzheimer’s disease, which affects close to 6 million Americans.

So if the research is really on to something, to protect your brain you need to get a minimum of four and a half hours sleep a night and no more than six and a half, so set your alarm clock for a 6 am wake up call if you’re hitting the hay at midnight and you’ll be within safe limits.

The studies lead author Brendan Lucey, MD, MSCI, associate professor of neurology and director of the Washington University Sleep Medicine Center, St. Louis, Missouri had this to say;

“This really suggests that there’s this middle range, a ‘sweet spot,’ where your sleep is really optimal,”

Sleep, AD and Cognitive function

The problem researchers face is unwinding the complex relationship shared by sleep, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and cognitive decline. In an earlier study by the same group, poor sleep quality was associated with early signs of AD, and a report published in September found that elderly people who slept less than 6 hours a night had a greater burden of amyloid-beta, a hallmark sign of AD.

For this particular study, however, researchers monitored sleep-wake activity over 4–6 nights in 100 participants who underwent annual cognitive assessments and clinical studies, including APOE genotyping, as part of a longitudinal study at the Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center at Washington University.

Participants also provided cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) total tau and amyloid-β42 and wore a small EEG device on their forehead while they slept. The majority of participants had a clinical dementia rating (CDR) score of 0, indicating no cognitive impairment. Twelve individuals had a CDR >0, with most reporting mild cognitive impairment. For more details on the trial itself, please refer to the linked article above.

What does the new data mean?

Understanding how sleep changes at different stages of AD could help researchers determine if sleep can be used as a marker of disease progression, which could in turn lead to interventions to slow that process. It’s like identifying a tell tales symptom that allows AD patients to be identified for possible treatment.

The upshot is that you want to try and ensure at least six hours of restful sleep a night, which, as you age, can prove challenging. As I age I now often find myself wide awake at 4 am and inevitably resort to coffee and the laptop, two terrible habits that are guaranteed to ban any further thought of sleep.

These are patterns we need to be aware of and try to address to ensure we’re hitting that sweet spot. Our sleep patterns may however reveal far more and as this research highlights, could soon be used as markers for certain conditions.

According to Lucey, who plans to repeat the study,

“We’re not at the point yet where we can say that we need to monitor someone’s sleep time and then do an intervention to see if it would improve their risk for cognitive decline, but that’s a question I’m very excited to try to answer.”

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