10 Risk Factors for Alzheimer’s Disease
Your body’s earliest warning signs
Some conditions can be successfully treated or even reversed.
Personally, I like giving my patients tools to take back their health (as opposed to putting them on pharmaceutical drugs that simply manage the condition).
But others are permanent and progressive… like Alzheimer’s disease.
The best way to treat this particular condition is to never get it in the first place.
I like giving my patients tools to accomplish that as well.
One way to do that is to identify key risk factors for the disease.
In a new study published in the journal The Lancet Digital Health, researchers from the Paris Brain Institute evaluated 123 health conditions from about 40,000 people with Alzheimer’s disease.
They compared them with a control matched for age and sex that did not have Alzheimer’s.
Ultimately, they identified 10 health conditions that had statistically significant associations with developing Alzheimer’s disease from 2-10 years later.
The earliest risk factor to show up was depression.
After that, these nine conditions made the cut:
- Anxiety
- Constipation
- Abnormal weight loss
- Cervical spondylosis (a type of arthritis)
- Reaction to severe stress
- Hearing loss
- Sleep disorders
- Fatigue
- Falls
Now, here’s the problem with a study like this.
While these conditions are associated with Alzheimer’s, we don’t know if they’re an underlying cause (a true risk factor), or an early symptom of the disease itself.
It’s the classic chicken or the egg scenario.
Fortunately, you can benefit from this knowledge regardless of the right answer.
You see, if these 10 health conditions are risk factors, you can take steps to fix them before it’s too late.
If they’re early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, it gives you a chance to get ahead of the disease before you’re showing any symptoms.
Alzheimer’s isn’t curable (yet), but the earlier you start treating it, the better your chances of slowing the progression of the disease.
