MY WORK as associate director of Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York has focused on the study of how our lifestyle choices influence the health of our brains. Not just to prevent or mitigate Alzheimer’s, but also to maintain optimal cognitive power over a lifetime.
The latest research, including my own work, supports the idea that keeping an active lifestyle – physically, intellectually and socially – increases cognitive health throughout life. A sedentary life, however, causes the loss of key structural and functional elements in the brain, with an aggressively higher vulnerability to brain ageing and dementia.