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August 3, 2019 – 09:45
PanARMENIAN.Net – Being socially active in your fifties and sixties can help reduce the risk of developing dementia later in life, a study found, according to The Guardian.
The researchers studied data tracking more than 10,000 people from 1985 to 2013. Respondents answered a questionnaire every five years about the frequency of their social contacts with friends and family. They were also subjected to cognitive tests and electronic medical records were searched for diagnoses of dementia.
The results – published in the journal Plos Medicine – showed that seeing friends almost every day at age 60 was badociated with a 12% lower chance of developing dementia compared to those who saw only a small amount of dementia. one or two friends every few months. Seeing parents, on the other hand, did not show the same beneficial badociation.
The authors suggest that the practice of using the brain for memory and language during social contact may constitute a so-called cognitive reserve.
Tara Spiers-Jones, professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the work, explained: "Learning new things makes connections between cells of the brain and social contacts. The biology underlying this study is that socially active people keep their brains better connected. If you have a better connected network in your brain, it can withstand pathology longer. "
Clive Ballard, a professor of age-related disorders at Exeter University, who was also not involved in the work, said, "Many other studies have shown that Social isolation is a risk factor. The strength of this work lies in the large population studied and in the fact that the evaluation of social contact took place well before the cognitive badessment. This reinforces the direction of causation. "
The authors note that the data did not include details about the quality of social contacts and that cases of dementia may have been missed if participants did not show up for their GP.
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