Reducing your risk of dementia
As we get older, so do our brains. We might get a little more forgetful, a little foggier, a bit slower to complete normal tasks. That’s a normal part of aging.
Dementia isn’t a normal part of aging. Dementia involves a marked decline in thinking, memory, behaviour in mood that gets worse over time. There’s no certain way to prevent dementia, and there are risk factors you can’t control, like getting older, genetics and family history.
But, just like with your other organs, the better you treat your brain, the stronger it will stay as you age, and the lower your chance of developing dementia.
It’s never too early or too late to get started. Whatever your age, there are simple changes you can make to protect your brain health and live a long, fulfilling life. Pick an item below to see what you can do in that area.
- Hearing and vision
Taking care of your hearing and vision can help you reduce your risk of developing dementia.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/hearing-and-vision - Sleep
Good sleep means good brain health. Find out how to get the most out of your bedtime routine and reduce your risk of developing dementia.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/sleep - Physical exercise
People who are physically active throughout their lives, particularly from age 65 on, are less likely to develop dementia.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/physical-exercise - Heart health
The more you do to take care of your heart, the better the result for your brain health. And it’s never too soon, or too late, to start.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/heart-health - Mental exercise
Just like your body, your mind gets stronger when it works out.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/mental-exercise - Healthy habits
How do you turn a good intention into a regular habit?
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/healthy-habits - Depression
Like any other illness, depression can be treated, and there are good options for support.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/depression - Staying social
A good social life helps us feel like we belong, like we’re connected to the world around us.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/staying-social - Alcohol, tobacco and other drugs
Reducing your alcohol, tobacco and other drug consumption can protect your brain health and reduce your risk of developing dementia.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/alcohol-tobacco-and-other-drugs - Protect your head
The best way to reduce your risk of CTE dementia is to protect your head and avoid injury.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/protect-your-head - Nutrition
Eat well for a healthier heart, body and mind and reduce your chance of developing dementia.
https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/reducing-your-risk-dementia/nutrition
Webinar: Reducing Dementia Risk
In this webinar, Dr Marita Long, Dementia Australia Honorary Advisor and practising GP, discusses changes in thinking and how to monitor them, as well as dementia risk factors and strategies that can help to reduce them.
You will learn about:
- changes in cognition and steps to take if concerned
- risk factors associated with dementia
- strategies and modifiable risk factors to reduce risk of dementia.
Transcript
[BEGINNING OF RECORDED MATERIAL]
[Title card: Reducing Dementia Risk - Dementia Australia Logo]
Dr Marita Long: Hello, I'm Dr. Marita Long. I'm a GP working in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I've got a strong interest in women's health and cognitive health. I'm also an honorary medical advisor for Dementia Australia, and today I'm going to be talking about reducing your risk of dementia. Before I start, I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we all meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to Elders past and present and to our shared futures.
So, it's always good to start with a few take-home messages. The first one today is really that dementia is more than a memory problem. It's actually now the leading cause of disability in those over 65 in Australia. It's a second leading cause of death overall, but the leading cause of death for women. There's no cure for dementia so preventative health strategies are the most effective intervention that we have to reduce the risk or delay the onset of dementia, and the ‘CogDrisk’ is an evidence-based tool we can use to better understand our own personal risk.
So, we are going to start by meeting Sarah. Sarah's probably like a lot of patients I see in practice. She's 48 years old, perimenopausal, and she's presented today with concerns about her memory. She's worried some of the symptoms she's experiencing might be the early signs of dementia and partly that's because her mum, Anna, who's aged 78, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's three years ago. The sort of things Sarah's been noticing are: she's having trouble finding the right word at times, she's got that real Tip-of-the-Tongue phenomena, she's missed a few appointments, which is really unlike her, and she's also finding that it's really hard to multitask like she once did. Dementia worry is actually a thing. For Australians, it's the second most feared condition and that's probably because we all know someone with dementia so we've experienced it from a personal perspective.
There's also a big focus now on trying to look at how we can prevent or delay the onset of dementia. We're seeing dementia in the media a lot more now. So, if you look at this screen, you can see that there's many movies or TV series, where the main character is experiencing or has dementia. And not long ago, we saw an article that turned up in the Women's Weekly, so we always feel in general practice, once it's in the Woman's Weekly, it's going to be coming into our office. And in fact, I read in a recent article that there is a general fear of getting older amongst Australians. It's called 'FOGO', you know, like 'JOMO', so 'Joy of Missing Out' or 'FOMO', 'Fear of Missing Out'. We now have FOGO. And if you look on this slide here, you can actually see that the thing that people fear most is cognitive decline, and of course, physical decline because the two of those interact and can cause an increased risk of loss of independence.
So why do we want to talk about dementia? This is a slide that I really like because it shows us that currently in Australia there's more than 400,000 people living with dementia. So that's the top line, that darker blue line. In the middle line, that's the number of women living with dementia and on the bottom line, it's the number of men living with dementia. And we can see, that all those lines are increasing because we've got an ageing population. So, as the years progress, we're going to be seeing more and more people diagnosed with dementia and we can see there that for women, it's still probably twice the number of people with dementia than men.
And this slide's also really good, so this is a capture from 2023, that shows the people living with dementia, and the reason this slide I think is really useful is that we can see that there are people in fact under the age of 65 living with dementia. Although there's less people, it's less common in those under 65-year-olds. We should still remember that it does occur then. And then if we look, we can see again, as people age, you can see all those age categories at the top of the slide, as people age, that their risk or the diagnosis of dementia also goes along with that. And I think the really interesting thing in this slide is, if we follow these categories along, we can see that at age sort of 75-79.
If we look at the slide on the far left, so that sort of medium blue slide, that's the number of men living with dementia. The light blue slide is the number of women and the dark blue on the right is the total number. So, if we look at 75–79-year age group, we can see that for men it actually is starting to level off. There's not that increase that we are seeing in women and so that's really interesting. So, it makes us think, well, why would that be? And I don't think anyone really knows the answer. But it might be that men of the older generations, they had access to probably more education than women and so, and they also probably had access to more cognitively stimulating jobs. So, they probably developed a greater cognitive reserve which can protect your brain. And then also, we always have known that men will have heart attacks or strokes and we've kind of geared the system a bit around to identifying vascular risk factors for men, much more than we have for women so that probably gives men a better brain reserve. So, they've probably had two things that have actually protected their brains a little bit more than women of a similar age. That's all of course starting to change now, as we see more and more women having higher levels of education and being in the workforce a lot more.
And this slide is really just to show you, the left slide is 2019, the right slide is 2066, and it's just really to show you that we've got an ageing population. So, the top part of that slide refers to the older age groups and we can see that getting bigger as the years go by, so we've got an ageing population. And now this slide is another one that just shows us if you are lucky enough to reach the age of 90, which is the bar at the very end there, we can see that there's probably close to 500 people per thousand people with dementia. So, if you live to the age of 90, you have a higher chance of developing dementia. So age is an associated factor with dementia. But some people might look at that and go, "Oh well, that's part, dementia's part of normal ageing." But we've got to remember there's also 50% of people who don't have dementia. So, we really have to stop thinking about dementia as part of normal ageing and recognise that it is actually a chronic disease that probably develops in midlife that we can, by addressing modifiable risk factors, reduce the risk.
So, if we're going to think about ageing and people who are experiencing memory problems like my patient Sarah, who we are thinking about today. We really have to understand what some of these myths are and what does normal ageing mean? What does mild cognitive impairment mean? And what does dementia mean? So normal ageing related cognitive changes are what most people experience, and we are all aware of that. So, it's where we have some mild memory lapses so we might be down the street and bump into a group of people and we think, “Oh, for the life of us we can't remember that person's name.” And it's where things take a little bit longer, things are getting a little bit harder. So, in fact a lot of these changes actually start happening in our third decade of life, but our life experience and knowledge tends to compensate till midlife and then we start to notice these things. There's no significant progression over time. So yes, things do get a little bit harder and slower. But it's not significant enough to impact with our ability to what I would say, is work and play, so we can still perform our normal duties, and we can still socialise without it causing too much impact. And we are mostly aware of it. You know that "Oh my god, goodness, I forgot that person's name." Or "Oh, I've put my keys down and I can't remember where they are again." But we can generally backtrack and those names or where we've left something comes back to us so we are very aware of it can often put things in place to make it easier to make these problems less difficult.
So, what's mild cognitive impairment? And look, that's a really tricky question. It probably affects quite a number of people in Australia who perhaps don't even know that they're experiencing that. So, it's where people will be aware of those subjective concerns. So, you know, maybe forgetting people's names and missing a few important dates, not keeping up as much with a lot of information as we may have had once upon a time. But we'll also see some changes if we did some cognitive assessment. So, it would be the person who feels they have some change, but we can also pick some of that change up on doing assessment. Generally, people will still work and play, they'll still be able to do their jobs and socialise, but it might be a little bit more difficult, and they might have had to really put some more structures in place. So really relying a more, a lot more heavily on a diary. Maybe putting some other prompts into their day-to-day life, so that things don't get missed. These are a very important group of people because you can progress onto dementia. Some people with mild cognitive impairment will stay the same, it will just follow a normal ageing trajectory. Some will get better, they'll improve. There will have been a reason for that change in cognition, but there will be a percentage of people who may go on to develop dementia so it's really important that we look at how we can keep ourselves as well and as healthy as possible to slow down that progression. And we'll talk about that in a minute.
So 'brain fog' is a relatively new term. And a lot of you may not have heard about brain fog. I'm a GP, I see a lot of women in the perimenopausal phase, and this is something they experience. So, it's when they report that their memory isn't so good or they're having trouble keeping up with things. They can't multitask as well as they could. Recalling words, numbers, misplacing things, trouble concentrating, forgetting appointments. Again, this is where there's a subjective concern. So, the person has noticed something's happening, but if we did cognitive testing, the most likely thing is it would all be normal. It's really important for women in this phase to understand that this is not early dementia and it is not a risk factor for dementia but it's the sort of patient we might keep track of. We might just keep in the back of our heads that they have reported some cognitive change, and we'll follow up to make sure that settles. For most women during menopause, brain fog does just settle down with time.
And then there's Dementia. So, I said in my take home messages that dementia is more than a memory problem, but that's often the first people, the first thing people notice or the first thing that other people notice. It's something we're all very familiar with. So, dementia is a gradual onset of declining cognition. Most commonly, memory and learning, but it can be other areas of cognition as well. Now, it has to be getting worse. Remember I said with mild cognitive impairment, for some it will stay the same, and for some it will improve. To have a diagnosis of dementia, the cognition has to be getting worse. We have to be able to demonstrate that there's a change that was of gradual onset and is getting worse and it has to impact on someone's ability to work and play, so their working life or social life is impacted. There's a change. They're not able to function as they had before they developed dementia and it's really important to also take note that it can't be explained by any other conditional reversible cause. There's lots of things that can 'mimic' dementia. For example, if someone becomes acutely unwell and develops a delirium. It can be a change in cognition, so we have to make sure someone doesn't have a delirium. If someone was to develop dementia, dementia can also mean that people can't function like they used to. They might start withdrawing and not going along to things anymore. They might, their thought processes might be slower. They might have a much flatter effect so you can see that it can sort of present in a similar way. So, it's really important that we're looking out for any other causes that could be mimicking dementia.
So, this is a slide that's useful for those of you who are real visual learners. So, you can see that it's looking at cognitive decline over time, and that top two lines refer to normal ageing changes, so it's different for everyone, but it's only very slight. If we look at the middle line, that's really the mild cognitive impairments line, so it's a little bit steeper, and in fact, we should probably have a line that's returning more to baseline. But you can see along that line there is this steep drop-off, and how different the cognitive changes of dementia will look. So how do we define dementia?
So, I guess it's important to think about this. Dementia is considered to be a progressive, global, life-limiting condition that really involves generalised brain degeneration. The tricky thing is, it affects people in different ways and has very many different causes so no two people present the same way, which can make it really hard to get a diagnosis. It's a chronic disease that is, has established modifiable risk factors that addressed, could probably prevent nearly half of the cases globally. We can't prevent or delay the onset for all cases, but we can for some. It's really an umbrella term. So, dementia is a, I guess, describes the symptoms that people have. It's not one specific disease. In Australia, the most common cause of Dementia is Alzheimer's disease and that's probably close to two thirds of the cases of dementia. Vascular dementia is probably the next most common cause of dementia, but we often see mixed patterns where people can have a bit of both. Again, which can make it a little bit tricky. Then the next leading cause in Australia would be Lewy body dementia and then Frontotemporal dementia.
But if you look under that orange slide, you can see there are lots of different causes. I said before that dementia was more than memory, although memory is often the first thing we notice, memory and learning. But this is a slide just to show you that it's more than memory again. So, cognition can mean things like attention. So, if you're having trouble focusing and paying attention, it can affect people's insight. It can affect people's planning or that higher-level order of function. And of course, we refer to the fact that it affects people's social life and it can affect people's emotions. When we think about functions, we think of activities of daily living. So that where people might no longer be able to follow a recipe to cook anymore, they may not be able to work their oven. They might be turning their hot plates on and leaving them on. So, it's the things that we do every day that all of a sudden, we're not doing so well. But we can also see a change in someone's hobby. So, for example, if someone was a very keen card sender, always got those cards out for people's birthdays with the cheque for, or the $5 note in them, that used to happen when I was growing up as a girl. It might be that all of a sudden isn't happening anymore. Or it might be someone who was the treasurer of the Bowl's Club and was always used to using an Excel spreadsheet, all of a sudden not being able to manage that anymore. So, we are looking at what changes we've seen in people's… the way people operate. Psychological things. So, we know that depression and anxiety can co-exist with dementia and could be part of those changes throughout the course of dementia really. But they can also, as I said before, mimic dementia. We know that most people with dementia at some time in their illness, may get some delusions and hallucinations. Behaviours can change, so all of a sudden someone who's always loved going out and socializing, may find that quite tricky. So, all of a sudden, they're not socialising anymore, or it might be a change in their disposition. So, the person who has always been quite placid and patient, can become quite short-tempered or have some irritability. And then of course, there's physical changes so some slowing with mobility early on. But later on, people can become quite immobile and also there can be some swallowing difficulties and difficulties with urinary continence later on.
So, let's come back to Sarah, and have a little think about Sarah. As I said, she's 48, she's perimenopausal, she's come really worried about her memory. She's worried this could be the early signs of dementia having seen mum diagnosed at age 78. So, let's have a little bit of a think about that. So, we know that having a family member can certainly increase your risk of developing dementia but in this case, this is someone who's developed dementia at age 75, so this is later in life. So that really doesn't put Sarah at high risk at 48 of developing dementia. If someone had come to see me who was 65 and they'd had a mum diagnosed at 75, it might raise a little bit more suspicion. Sarah's very young and remember we looked at that slide, it's quite rare to have dementia under the age of 65, so I think that's an important thing to think about when we are all worried if we've had a family member diagnosed with dementia. So, I did, you've just got to trust me here, that I did take a very thorough history and I did do some cognitive assessment, and I decided that really Sarah's memory concerns were likely to be related to her perimenopause. It is very common during that transition that women experience. It's possible this could be a mild cognitive impairment, again, it's a little bit early, but in the back of my mind as a doctor, I'd be thinking, "Hmm, I've just got to make sure that this does resolve over time." So, every six months I might check in to see how Sarah's going, and I feel confident I can reassure her that mum was later in life developing dementia age 75 so it's very unlikely this will be dementia. But what a presentation does do for me, is really say "This is a great opportunity though Sarah, to have a think about your brain health and what might your risks of developing dementia be?"
So, what is a brain health check? It's not something we talk about a lot in medicine. We talk a lot about a heart health check, but we haven't really got to the point about talking about a brain health check. But essentially what it is, is an opportunity for your GP to talk to you about your brain health. Identify, are you at risk? Are, do you have any of the modifiable risk factors? And midlife is a really important time to do this because we know that that's when the pathology for dementia starts so it's sort of the perfect time. Good take home message though, "Never too early, never too late", but “midlife is a really opportune time”. We can use some evidence-based tools to help establish any of those personal risk factors. But most importantly, we can assist you to develop a plan to reduce your overall risk of developing dementia.
So, what opportunities would your doctor have to do this brain health check? Well, you might know this, but between the ages of 45 and 49, most people in Australia are eligible for a comprehensive health assessment and this would be the perfect time to include a brain health check. If you haven't had a health check in midlife in these years, this is something you can talk to your GP about. Then additionally, because we should be thinking about brain health throughout the whole of life, any person over the age of 75, is eligible, every year for a health check with their GP. Again, a perfect time to look at any risks and an opportunity to do some cognitive assessment if that was needed. Any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person can have an annual check at any age. And this is really important because we have to remember for this population, they are about three to five times more at risk of developing dementia, and at a younger age. So, these are a really important group that should be going off to have and having their health checks done. Anyone living in a residential aged care facility, remember we looked at that graph? So, the older you are, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with dementia. So older people living in our residential aged care facilities, they're eligible for their annual health check as well. And anyone living with an intellectual disability. So again, important to think about anyone who has Down syndrome because they're at higher risk of Alzheimer's disease.
So, what are the modifiable risk factors? Now this is from the Lancet Commission. It was updated in July, 2024. So, this is a, you know, a group of people who are working incredibly hard to figure out what the risk factors might be. At the moment, we know there's no curative treatment for dementia. There are lots of things we can do to improve a person's quality of life, slow things down. But at this stage, there's no curative treatment. So, in general practice we always say, "Prevention is better than cure but where, when there is no cure, prevention becomes everything."
So, this slide is really important. And you can see it's mapped out over the whole course of life. So early life is really 0-45, Midlife 45-65 and later life 65 onwards. And the reason why we've got these risk factors divided up like that is because that's where the evidence is. But really, all of these factors we want to be thinking about through the whole life course, so we can see there, fourteen. Quality of education. So having access to education is really important with the young kids that we keep them well. We check their things like hearing, their vision, we make sure they have every opportunity to achieve and stay in the school system. Midlife, the things we think of commonly, a lot of the same risk factors we think about for something like heart disease, so smoking, blood pressure, drinking too much, having an unhealthy BMI, not exercising enough, developing diabetes. These are all things that could put you at risk of heart disease as well, but these are important for our brains. Other things there, hearing impairment, brain injury. So, we've heard a lot more recently about all the sports people who have had concussions and how that puts them at risk of developing dementia type symptoms. And depression, we are understanding more and more is a bigger risk factor. And then if we move on to later life. Visual impairment. And if you think about hearing and vision, if you can't hear or you can't see so well, you're probably less likely to go out and socially interact. You might become more lonely, a higher risk of depression that puts you at risk of dementia. So, these are important things to be thinking about. Social isolation, we know in general practice one-in-five visits will probably relate to loneliness. So, thinking about connecting people in with their community, very important. And air pollution, it's probably not something we do so much in the general practice office, although we do have a lot of GP's who are really looking into climate change and air pollution. But this is something that really should be addressed at public policy level, as should all of these things as well. But there are things that me, as a GP, and you as an individual, can work on as well.
The other things that I've got on the side there that we know are risk factors that haven't quite made it into this list of risk factors or the Lancet Commission report yet. Sleep. We know sleep is incredibly important. And sleep is important for a whole range of things. Diet. Again, important for a whole range of our health and wellbeing. It's important for our brain, our heart, our bones, our kidneys. Atrial fibrillation, that's an abnormal rhythm of your heart, which can put you at risk of stroke. They are also risk factors for developing dementia. So, there are things we are thinking about addressing in general practice as well. So early life educational cognitive health. I don't know how many of you have talked about the fact that, "Oh I'm going to be fine, because I'm doing my crossword every day." Well, what we know is if you do a crossword every day, you're going to become really good at crosswords. So, I'm not saying don't do the crossword, but when we are thinking about cognitive health, it's broader, and it's doing things perhaps that you are not used to doing. So, for someone like me, who sits at a desk and is using my brain a lot, for me it might be better to learn a musical instrument or learn a new dance style. So put myself really out there and learn how to do some 'hip-hop'. So, it's doing something new and different and challenging with your brain and mixing it up a bit. So, and in that, also is things like perhaps going and visiting a museum, going to an art gallery. So that can also do your cognitive health, but it can also do some social interaction as well. So, we want to think a little bit broad and not just doing your crossword or your Sudoku every day.
Exercise, now again, these are things that probably people when we're thinking about physical health people go, well what kind of exercise? My advice is, well there might be lots of little nitty, gritty trials, that say, "this one's better than this one". From my perspective, I think, find something you like doing and do it every day, that's the best thing. If it's something you don't like, you're not going to do it for all that long. That might be walking with a friend, it might be working out in your garden, pulling those weeds up, really, you know, working hard out there. It might be going to the gym. It might be having a personal trainer to do some strength training. Whatever works for you, just get out and be more active. Of course, we know we should all be stopping smoking for nearly every health condition. Blood pressure, really important that when you're seeing your GP, they're checking your blood pressure and we're addressing how we can keep your blood pressure in the normal range. In terms of diet, again, we know there is evidence for the Mediterranean diet, in terms of preventing a whole lot of health conditions. But again, don't get too bogged down in what exactly is a Mediterranean diet. What we want to see people doing is eating a varied diet with lots of fruit and lots of veg and mixing it up a bit. And of course, Alcohol. We really now recommend that you shouldn't be having any more than, for men, two standard drinks a day, women, one standard drink a day. But to be honest, there's probably no real safe level of alcohol, we just don't know that yet.
And we've talked a little about loneliness. Loneliness is a really big thing in our community, and I think we all saw those impacts during Covid. So, we are all much more acutely aware of that. So, in general practice we work quite hard to connect people in with their local community. And one fantastic example that has been taken up in general practice is connecting in with 'park run', which is where people can meet on a Saturday morning. They can walk, they can run, they can jog. Meeting other people, getting their exercise and feeling connected in with their community. If you do feel like your mood has changed, that you are feeling like some, there's more days than not where you are feeling sad or a bit down, really important to talk to your GP about that as well. There's lots we can do to help people with depression.
So, what is the CogDrisk? I'm just going to talk briefly about this, but this is a cognitive health and dementia risk assessment. It's evidence-based, it's been developed in Australia. It's adjusted for age and gender and so it's a really good tool. Anyone can do this tool, it's validated for anyone over the age of 18. It's online, it takes about 20 minutes to do, it asks you lots of questions, particularly lots of questions about how many veggies you eat and how many times you eat hot chips or potato chips. So, you've got to think about those questions really carefully. But what it does is, it works out what some of your risk factors are. It also works out what you are doing really well. So, I would encourage everyone who's listening to this to jump online. Again, I said it takes about 20 minutes. You can download a report, you can save it, you can print it out and you can bring that to talk to your GP about the opportunity to do a brain health check with your report.
And I'm just going to talk you through this report. So, this was Sarah's report because I asked her to do this as part of looking at what her individual risks were. So, if you are over the age of 40 when you do this, it will generate a number score between zero and 36.25, in terms of your risk of dementia. Obviously the higher the number, the higher the risk. But really, take home message anything over zero, there's room for improvement, so it'll give you your risk of dementia at age 65 not at age 40 or age 48 when you do it. It's your risk when you turn 65, if you don't change any of those risk factors. Now what's particularly nice about this report is you can see on the, well my left-hand side, where the green is, that it's saying, 'keep up the good work'. So that's all the things you're doing well, that's all the factors that are protecting you from developing dementia. And then under the orange label which says, 'room for improvement', are some of the risk factors that you have. And so, these are the things that you might want to have a look at and say for example, "Oh, eating fish less than once a week, well I could easily increase my fish intake." "I don't mind tuna; I might start taking tuna for lunch." "And I might, when I go out, eat fish." Or "I might go to the fish market and buy some fish once a week to eat." So that's something you can do quite easily to reduce your risk. And then there might be things in there that you might want some help from your GP. So, for example, a lot of people in their midlife really struggle with weight and how to figure out how to lose some weight or not put on any more weight. That might be something that you talk to your GP about and if I'm the GP, I might go, well I'd really like to work out what's going on with your blood pressure. Let's see if we can reduce your blood pressure. So, it's a really good springboard to go into how we can look at modifying some of the risk factors that you might have for developing dementia. So, in terms of Sarah, what we did is we did come up with a weight management plan. She was going to look at her Mediterranean diet. She said she could easily increase her fish, and she was actually incredibly open to reducing her alcohol, that had sort of suddenly increased because she was trying to juggle so many things as so many of us do in midlife. So that was quite easy. We talked about how she could increase her activity, and she did have a friend who lived around the corner who liked walking. So, her plan was to really contact her friend and start going for a walk most days. I was going to work with her to look at her blood pressure and she had identified some changes in her mood, which again is no wonder when you're sort of juggling a lot, you're worried about your memory not performing quite as well at work. So how can we address that? And it was quite an acceptable plan to Sarah. We made this plan together and my approach to this would be that I would check in, you know, probably every three to four weeks to start off with and that might sort of stretch out to months depending on how we go.
Okay, so this is the Brain Tracker app. This is another cool app. It's a free app, developed by Dementia Australia. Anyone can download it. Important to note, it's not a diagnostic tool and it's not a screening tool. It's for anyone who has any concern about their cognition. It's an opportunity to really explore and learn about your brain health and where you might be able to again, identify some, some risk factors and some areas for change. You can also monitor what's going on with your cognition over time. And I'll talk about that in a minute but it's a great conversation starter. Again, it's something you can take to your GP and say, "Hey look, I've downloaded this app, I'd really like to talk about brain health." So, the Brain Track app is based on activities that are themed around a travel narrative because apparently all Australians love to travel. They say there's eight fun and interactive games. Now I think fun is stretching the truth, they're actually quite hard, I've done it, trust me. The games are around things like packing your bag. What things you might need to take. Picking your bags off the carousel. You've got to remember which bag that you've packed. Meeting travel companions, remembering things about them and using a map to find your way around cities. Each game is actually assessing a different cognitive domain. And this is, I guess a picture of what the cognitive assessment looks like. So, you can see for most people you should really be in that blue ring, that would be considered normal. If you are dipping down across too many areas, that might be a trigger to have some more formal testing going but important to remember this is not a diagnostic app. This is really an app that show, gives us a little bit of information that you can take along to your health professional to really nut out what could be going on.
So, there's lots of different things that we can do that can help us start those conversations about our brain health with our GP. The CogDrisk and the Brain Track app are good starting points. So, I hope you've been able to learn something from this and that you'll be feel more confident to go along to your GP if you've got any concerns about your brain health. Our take home messages again. Remember dementia is more than a memory problem, but that's often the first thing people notice or what's being noticed about them. Dementia's now the leading cause of disability in Australians who are over the age of 65. It's the second-leading cause of death but it's the leading cause of death for women. Currently, there's no cure for dementia. There are lots of things we can do to slow the progression and to improve quality of life for people living with dementia, but preventative health strategies are our most effective intervention at the moment to reduce risk or delay onset of dementia. And the CogDrisk is an evidence-based tool that you can use to better understand and address your individual risk of dementia. Thanks so much for listening.
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