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Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years

neurology.org

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Re: Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years

#81
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of TFA, what hypothesis makes much more sense to you than what alternative?

TFA? Not sure what you mean. The hypothesis (I'm paraphrasing) is the fructose severely downgrades the mitochondria (this is well established). The part that is really interesting to me is that patients with alzheimer's have huge amounts of fructose in their brains (that's covered the in the podcast). So, lots of fructose, mitochondria impacted, thus neurons degraded. Makes sense to me. As far as alternative hypothes…

TFA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756

Alzheimer's disease is a specific subtype of dementia; this article seems to be more focused on vascular dementia (or at least vascular risk factors) -- why I was curious about the relationship between e.g. smoking and fructose.

The association of fructose has been studied directly in the context of AD, and the hazard ratio is modest (and not necessarily dose-dependent) [0]:

> After adjustment for sex, age, MMSE at baseline, education level, SBP, treatment of hypertension, LDL, uric acid, prevalent diabetes mellitus, current smoking, alcohol consumption, dietary fiber intake, total energy intake, sugar in beverage, seafood, red meat, fried foods, animal fat, personal income, marital status, physical activity index, and BMI in the Cox regression model, participants with consumption of fructose more than 7 servings/week showed a higher risk of all-cause dementia and AD dementia (HR: 1.49, 95% CI: 1.14–1.84, P for trend I haven't seen anything about the fructose content of brains of AD patients; do you have a (preferably non-video) reference / source?

[0]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S227458072...

Re: Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being human, I think more about the number of dementia years than number of dementia-free years. Could having good dietary, sleep, and exercise habits result in living longer with dementia? I've hard about cognitive reserve and how healthy lifestyle choices can build that. But I never read about ways to minimize the number of years you have to live with dementia. I wish I could sign an order that would grant me a dig…

You're looking at this from the wrong angle. The dementia risk and longevity have overlapping factors. Lifestyle choices correlated with shorter lifespan are also correlated with earlier dementia onset. They're not perfectly proportional, but getting earlier dementia and also living shorter is lose-lose. Technically there's an extreme version of this where someone's lifestyle is so bad that they're unlikely to live p…

> getting earlier dementia and also living shorter is lose-lose

That depends. I'd rather die at 70 after a year of dementia than live to 85 where the last five of those I have dementia. I want to minimize the number of years with dementia, not maximize the number of years without.

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