You may have realized that being healthy feels different than it did in the past. Now that you're over 50, if you want to maximize your health potential but don't have time to read through overwhelming pages of Google links, this is the show for you. Welcome to healthy tips after 50. We love doing the research, finding solutions, talking to health experts, and learning what works and what doesn't.
Now, your host, she spent the last 25 years dedicated to feeling her best and is here to share her best findings with you, Susan Rosen. Hello, everyone. This is your host, Susan Rosin. And my guest today is Mitchell Clionsky. Oh, I got it. Right. Okay. Nailed the landing. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And he is here today to talk about a number of different things, but I think one of the big ones is dementia. I believe you can correct me if I'm wrong.
And, but, Mitchell, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up doing what you're doing and what it is. By the way, it's a surprise. Your audience will be fun. We're actually going to talk today about dementia prevention, which is really an important and growing topic because there's more and more people getting older.
And most of us, I think maybe all of us, would rather not end up with dementia, with having a progressive neurological disease like Alzheimer's or vascular dementia or several or any of the other types of memory disorders. As we age, knowing that there are things that we can do about it that could reduce our risk by up to 50% is really big news. And my job as a neuropsychologist is to inform people that there are things they can do and how to go about it.
So that's why my wife, who is a physician, psychiatrist, an internal medicine doctor as well. Her name is Dr. Emily Cliansky, and I wrote a book for Johns Hopkins Press published in April of last year, 2023. Oh, wow. We've been doing this for a year now called Dementia Prevention, Using Your Head to Save Your Brain. Oh, uh huh. That's what we're all about today, is how to use your head to save your brain. Oh, well, I think we all need that, no matter what our age is at this point.
Well, the earlier you start, oftentimes the more successful you are, although it's really never too late. And we see people in our practices. I'm a neuropsychologist. I have a PhD, a doctorate in clinical psychology, and an advanced specialization called board certification in clinical neuropsychology. My job is primarily to first evaluate someone's memory functioning. Is that senior moments they're having significant.
Does it reflect that they're losing memory or that they're just having a senior moment and momentarily can't come up with a name or remember where they left their keys? There's one guy today I was talking to, and he talked about how he kept leaving his keys next to the butter in the refrigerator. And I wondered if that was when he was coming home from grocery shopping. He just put everything in the refrigerator together.
Yeah. But, you know, we all have this kind of experiences, maybe not that particular one, but of not being able to come up with the word we want. Forget something that we know. Why don't. Why did I walk into this room? Or where did I leave my coffee? Yeah.
So, my job is to test people's memory and their problem solving skills and their ability to pay attention and a variety of other mental functions, and then compare their scores with what we would expect for someone of their age and background to see if it's normal or if it's not, then if it's not normal, to figure out what the diagnosis is and what we can do to help them either prevent getting worse or, in some cases, to get back to where they used to be.
So it's a pretty exciting kind of idea. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, it's interesting. Do you do it. Do you do it in, like, a clinical setting, or is, you know. Or is, you know. So I think there's so many different ways that you can do that. Right. Yeah. So, I've been practicing in western Massachusetts for the past 45 years. I know it looks like I'm only 35 or 40 years old, but I really started very young. I thought you dyed your hair. Yeah, I did.
I wanted that white haired look that would give me authenticity. That's right. The respect. Right. Yeah. So, I have a clinic that I share patients, in many cases with my wife, and at other times, just my own practice. And we get referrals from doctors, physicians in the community, as well as people can just come in on their own. And currently I've got three testing assistants who work for me. But in the past, I've had a much larger practice.
I've had a number of postdoctoral residents as well who have been training, but I've been modifying my practice a little bit over the last few years to be a little smaller. So I only see about 600 or 700 new patients a year now, whereas before it used to be more like 1000 to 1200. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.
It's a busy practice, but I really enjoy what I do, because every day there's something new, a new project or a new idea or some problem that I haven't seen before that I'm very interested in trying to figure out how to help people deal with. Uh huh. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I can see where it would. You'd never get bored because every person's different, right? They are. I mean, there's certainly commonalities.
Memory loss is something that we see a lot of, as well as the problem solving aspects, where people can no longer figure out how to do the things they used to be able to figure out easily. And that's where we start looking at what's behind this, what can cause this. And we have some tools at our disposal to help people not get worse. And so that's really important.
So what are the main, I mean, I'm sure that there's, like, probably, like everything else, there's a smaller group of things that happen to people versus this whole other group. Right. That only has one or two people scattered through it. So, like, what are the major types of dementia? That's sort of what you're looking at, right? Yeah. People equate Alzheimer's disease with dementia. And so they're often asking, what's the difference there?
And the difference is that Alzheimer's is a type of this larger category called dementia. Sort of like Ford is a type of automobile, but so Chevy, and so is Toyota. So while Alzheimer's has gotten most of the publicity as a disease entity, you got a big Alzheimer's association. And the money, too, I think, and. Money and chapters all over the place. Vascular dementia, what we used to call hardening of the arteries. Oh, yeah.
Caused by changes in circulation, high blood pressure, high levels of cholesterol, smoking, things like that. Diabetes that impairs blood flow is also extremely important, both as its own entity. People who've had strokes, transient ischemic attacks called tias, minor strokes, but also in combination with Alzheimer's disease. It's actually the largest group, has a combined form of both Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. We also have dementias that arise from Parkinson's disease. My dad had that.
With Parkinson's have problems moving, but in about a third of the cases, they also suffer cognitive loss. Yeah. Yeah, my dad had that. Yeah. You've seen that up close and unfortunately, too personal. Yeah. You can also get dementias from head trauma. Sometimes only one blow to the head, but also sometimes repeated blows. Yeah. Yeah. Me and sidewalks tripping and falling. Oh, yeah. Okay. Because usually it's motor vehicle accidents. That are the big culprit there with people.
I've had that once as well. But no, most. Mostly not picking my feet up. And, yeah, there's a lot of different ways you could get this. You know, Bruce Willis has a form called phratotemporal dementia that's pretty different than the other aspects of dementia, but is important in its own right. Usually it impacts people who are younger and usually impairs either how well they can speak or changes their personality so that they lose their inhibitions.
They do things, say things which are not normal for them. Many cases not so appropriate either. Yeah. So there's a whole lot of flavors to this dementia thing. Wow. And yet there's a lot of commonalities as to factors that can increase or decrease our chances of getting dementia. It's not just in our genes.
Actually, our genetic background only accounts for about 5% of most types of dementia, which is sad news for people who are really in families heavily predisposed, but they're fortunately pretty few and far between for most of us. You look back and you find there's someone in your history who's had dementia, but it may not be genetic. It may simply be that mom had five siblings, so she had dementia the other five didn't.
Well, that's less than the base rate, the average for somebody of her age, where at age 75, her risk is 20%. Well, she's got five siblings and she got it. That's less than even 20%. So it's not just in your genes. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Can it be also from what people's diet is, you know, what they're eating or not eating or. Yeah. See, everybody wants to eat their way into better health. That's America. And I got a problem. Let me find a diet that's good for it. Yeah.
What you find is you write a book about dementia prevention, and suddenly you're being outsold by books on the diet, the Alzheimer's diet, how to eat your way into this. Here's a news flash. Despite the fact that it's good to eat a good diet, like the mediterranean diet, which is heavy on vegetables and fish and chicken, things like that, and olive oil, you cannot eat your way into better cognitive health unless you happen to have an extremely poor diet.
So if you're spending most of your life in the fast food lanes, driving through and picking up burgers and fries. On the way with all that fat and stuff. Yeah. Or ordering pizza as your major food group, changing that to a mediterranean diet probably would help you. But when they look at the research, what they find is that the mediterranean diet doesn't really outperform a good, regular, wholesome, well balanced diet. But Americans want to find that thing. Is it blueberries? Is it raspberries?
Is it green, leafy vegetables? What can I eat? I have to tell them, eat what you like, but don't eat too much of it, because if you're overweight, that'll be a problem. If you're not exercising, that'll be a problem. But you really can't eat a supplement or a nutraceutical or something extra that's going to make enough of a difference that you can ignore all the other factors. Yeah. No, no. That makes a lot of sense.
I think looking at your diet affects a lot of other things, but probably not so much the dimension kinds of. Things, if it could, because imagine how easy it would be to take a couple, you know, we crammed all the vegetables and fruits into these little capsules by freeze drying them. And now if you just eat three of these and three of these, as you see in some portions, you're going to be fine. Yeah. Wouldn't that be wonderful? I can write a one page book. That's all it would take. Guess what?
Doesn't work that way, right? There's a lot of other factors that are involved, and you can't undo those simply by eating some little vegetable tablets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking more along the lines of high fat kinds of diets. But that's not necessarily the dementia. It's more like heart issues or. Well, anything that affects your heart affects your brain. Okay, so that's why smoking is terrible for your brain.
That's why sedentary behavior, where you're sitting on your buttons that have end up moving, is really bad for your brain. That's why excessive alcohol is bad for both your heart and your brain. That's why obstructive sleep apnea, where you're not getting enough oxygen to your brain while you're asleep, is bad for both your heart and your brain. Why a heart attack is bad for your brain. All those things that are good for your heart are in fact good for your brain.
Okay. It's one of the reasons why you good heart health. If you follow goals for that, you're probably going to go a long way in many cases toward improving your brain function. That sounds good. Stimulation, that's really important in many cases. But then there's other things as well. For example, you probably didn't know that hearing loss is associated and is a cause for memory decline. Yes. People, I have my hearing aid here. Do you? Great. Hope you wear them all day long.
Oh, no, just one. Just that side. Okay. I hope you wear it all day long, because I do. It's the background noise that's really important to stimulate your brain. Yeah. And some people just view it as, I'll bring them out because I'm having friends over and I need to hear them. Don't. That's. This is not the crown jewels of England. Don't bring them out just for state occasions.
Wear them even when you're home alone, even when you're doing solitary things, because you want to hear the birds chirping. That's going to stimulate your brain. That dog next door that's barking, that's driving you nuts, inadvertently may be stimulating your brain, so don't turn it off. Yeah, no, and I. And I use it actually it with my phone instead of. I don't use the ipod for my phone. I use my hearing aid.
So it's incredible what's happened with the technology over the last couple of years because they keep getting better and better and cheaper. Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I have some kind of genetic issue with it where it gets the bone that makes the noise go through is. What's the right word? Gotten hard. Okay. So it can't push. It doesn't vibrate. Hardly at all. Yeah. So the hearing aid pushes stuff around it. Interesting. And right into the brain. Yeah, yeah.
My mother, it turns out my mother had it as well, but she never got hearing aids. We won't go there. It's true for a lot of people. Part of it is that they used to be really big. They used to. Nowadays you recharge them in many cases with the batteries. That's right. And also, it used to be something that were really expensive. These days, a lot of hearing aids you can get for $1,500 a full set. Yeah. Or less. Beautiful. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And. And they'll go for years and years.
I mean, it's not like it's, you know, you have to get a new one every year or anything. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. No, and that's. In fact, I've done a couple of podcasts about hearing and hearing aids and how. How if you don't go out and get help with it, you're leaving yourself open for lots of different issues, brain issues. And also, you tend to withdraw and you tend not to be social and therefore cut down on your skin because you can't hear. Right. You miss out on the fun.
I mean, a lot of times people don't hear well, don't understand humor very well. Cause there's a subtlety to it. And if it's not funny or it's not interesting, you don't involve yourself because. Why? Yeah. Yeah. Cause you can't hear it. You can't tell the difference. Yeah. No, that makes perfect sense of smell. It's really. You're not gonna enjoy eating, and you're not gonna be a very good cook anymore because you're not getting that, you know, that feedback that tells
you what things are like. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I have a little. I have a little of that myself, too. We all lose some sense of smell as we get older. It's worse for men than for women. Interesting. Okay. And it gets worse if you have neurological injuries. It's worse if you are depressed. People don't smell as well. And also, loss of smell for some people is an early sign of Alzheimer's disease. Turns out that the olfactory lobes, which are in our brain, have these
projections down through our nose. And so we're actually. Our nose is connected to our brains in a direct pathway, and that same loss of smell that we experience is actually because of degeneration in that part of our brain. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I actually lost. I don't have a big loss, but I have some after having Covid at the very beginning when people didn't know it was Covid. Yeah. That's a pretty common kind of thing.
I see people who've got long Covid in my practice, and despite being vaccinated to the maximum, I also had a mild case of COVID It was really interesting. I lost my sense of smell for a week, which would have been more interesting had I been assured that I would get it back. But I was a little worried. You couldn't watch and see what was going on. Right. Yeah. I kept trying to test it with lemons and vanilla and other things. The only good part was my son visited with his wife and their son.
At that point, my grandson was about eight months old, and so I volunteered to change the diapers because I wasn't bothered at all by it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly, exactly. Yeah. I had all the vaccinations and everything, but I caught it. I had it before people knew what it. What it was before vaccinations. Yeah. You know. Oh, absolutely.
That getting a fever of any type that's severe like that, whether it's Covid or RSV or pneumonia, all of which, if you're an older person, can be a trigger for the development of cognitive decline. So it's really important to do whatever you can to be vaccinated and to avoid having viruses. They're one of those things that just can tip the edge from something that's a mild memory problem into something that's more severe. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. No, we get. We get all of them.
But then again, we live in a county that I think we have the highest vaccination rate in the country. Wow. Okay. That's good. You have good herd immunity. Thank you. Around you are also vaccinated. Yes. The other thing that people don't understand is that gingivitis, caused by tooth decay and gum loss, is also something that can cause the beginnings of dementia. Bacteria get in through your gums and can impact your brain functioning.
So, as I tell people, I learned this from my dental hygienist when I showed her the research on this. And I tell people, she turned around and used the f word. And the wif word is floss. Oh, okay. So I use the f word, and I encourage everybody I know to use the f word. Oh, yeah. Make a big difference in your brain health. Yeah. Not to mention your. Your wallet. Yes, it is expensive. If you have to go back for repeated dental work. Oh, my God, yes, yes, absolutely.
Especially as you get older, all of a sudden you're having to get gold and all this other stuff. And if you don't want the gold, then the other part, I mean, just. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But it's. Yeah, it's. I think that from an outsider's point of view, that it seems that people know dementia, the word, but it scares them off so much that I don't think they take the time to actually learn anything about it. It is frightening. And so a lot of people would rather.
It's sort of like cancer in that sense. It's so frightening that people will avoid getting tested for cancer. They'll avoid getting tested for things that could be involved with dementia for the same reason. And then you also have physicians who don't want to deal with dementia. There was a study that was done a few years ago where they found that 40% of doctors are uncomfortable diagnosing or treating dementia.
So consequently, you go into your PCPS office and say, you know, I'm really worried about the fact that I'm having some memory problems. There's a good chance your doctor's going to look at you and say, ah, me too. I'm sure it's normal. Everyone's got that problem as rather than what they would do for almost any other condition. If you went and said, you know, my heart rate feels really strange, your doctor would say, well, let me listen.
If you said, I'm really worried because high blood pressure runs in my family, you say, well, let's take your blood pressure. He said, I think I got a few worm all the time. There's something going on. He said, well, let's run a test to see what your sed rate is. Let's see if you have a fever. You ask them about your cognition, and you don't get anything. They say, you seem fine to me. Don't worry about this. I'm sure it's okay. And that's a shame, because what it means is it delays diagnosis.
And during that time, your brain is very possibly, if you're developing dementia, changing and it's beginning to lose connections and it's beginning to lose brain matter and you haven't dealt with it, so you can't do any of the early stages to try to change the course of things. Your doctor's not ordering an MRI for you. Your doctor's not ordering relevant blood tests. At that point, your doctor is not even prescribing a medication that could slow down the rate of decline.
So we're missing opportunities. Yeah. So there's a lot of education needs to be done within the medical community so that doctors will say, I feel comfortable doing something to start the ball rolling. I may not be comfortable making the final diagnosis. I may want a specialist to do that. But I want to try to separate people into the groups of those who should be followed up versus those who probably, I can wait and see what they're like over time.
Pick up those people who really are dealing with depression. Depression. And that's what's causing them to feel like they can't remember. Or maybe they're just worried. Well, so there's a couple different buckets that you might end up trying to put people in, but you should be doing that at that stage rather than simply shrugging it off as just, you know, normal kind of stuff for somebody your age. Yeah, yeah, no, I know. I know when I. Because I actually did go in.
I have Kaiser and actually, I don't remember whether I actually went in or talked to him on the phone, but anyways, instead. Well, you know, I'm really kind of not up to the same level that I was just a little bit ago, which was after the whole Covid thing that nobody knew was Covid and, and they said, well, you can go in and take, you know, do the test. And we did the test and it came out, you know, and I was like, and they said, well, you're kind of on the cusp, you know, but not really.
And, you know, why don't you hold off and we'll wait. Do it again, see how you, you know, whether it gets better or worse. Right? And I'm like, okay, that's fine. I can do that. And, yeah, and it kind of has fluctuated over the last, what time? About four years, five years now. So, yeah, the question becomes, did it really get better? Did it really get worse? Or do they ever figure out if there's anything else that could be the cause for that?
There's where I would, I like to get people worked up in a more thorough way because I like to have answers and I like to have ideas that we could follow up. So we start looking at, well, here's some blood tests. As you'll see in our book, there's a whole model that we build chapter by chapter through the book as to what blood tests your doctor should order. By the way, you don't even have to read the book for this.
You can get our 25 item for free dementia prevention checklist from our website, which is called Brain doc, braindoc raindock. com. and you can go up on there, you can either download, you can print it out or take it online. Takes a little while if you go do it online, because there probably are some questions you may not be able to answer right away. So I encourage people maybe to download it the first time, fill it out on paper.
But by doing so, you will develop a good idea of where you are either on target with your dementia prevention goals, whether you're near target. So you just need to. So, for example, the goal might be that you have a blood pressure of 130 over 80 or lower and your blood pressure is 140. So that's probably a near target for blood pressure as opposed to someone who's got 160 or 170, which is off target.
Or you might be on target with that, but you'll be able to go through each of those different areas because it is a complex model. It's one that's got, you know, 20 different factors in our model that we have in the book. But we build it step by step, chapter by chapter, because that's the only way you can really understand it. See, people are always looking for what's the one thing. Yeah, right. The answer is there isn't one thing.
It is a combination of many things, all of which can be looked at and many of them can be modified. But you have to understand the wholeness of it. It's not just eat this, do that. It's not just something that you can do. We see that all the time. It's clickbait. Four things you should do to avoid dementia. Five foods you should eat. Boy, it would be great if it were that easy. We had fixed it already. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I can't figure this out.
Yeah, well, and I mean, to be perfectly honest, and maybe that's not the right word, but that's appropriate to almost everything in your body and medicine and all of that. Right. There are certain things that may be similar or that maybe. Oh, yeah, that's something that most people who have da da da da da start with or whatever, but it's still. Everybody is different, literally. But also it's very much interconnected. That's the other one. Absolutely.
They have a little different profile. That's right. Where you're on target versus where you're off target. But a number of things get interactionally connected. For example, let's suppose that you don't exercise. There's a better chance at that point that your weight is not going to be where you want it. There's a better chance that your cardiovascular system is not going to work as well.
There's a better chance that you're going to have problems with balance and with your falls risk, so that you're more likely to sustain those falls that end up in fractures or head injuries or things like that. Oh, yeah. There's a better chance that you're going to spend more time falling asleep on the couch, reading or watching tv and therefore miss out on things. So these things are all connected.
And sometimes one intervention, like getting people to do more physical things, will have a positive spread because then helps their circulation and it helps their weight and it helps their strength, and it gets them doing things so they. Their mood is better. So all these things have to be dealt with as a system, I guess, is really what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. What a novel concept. Yeah. Well, the majority of people overall, and I use the word loosely, don't.
It's very hard for them to comprehend or go along, you know what I mean? To understand that it's all connected. They don't want to see it that way.
I find that if we can take science and explain it in ways that people understand, not by dumbing it down, but by clarifying the information, they begin to start seeing that connectivity, I really have a very good rate of getting my patients, who sometimes are well educated, other times are not, understand how all of these things are connected and to apply that to their lives.
Our goal in doing this kind of a book was to translate that science so that it felt for people like they were sitting in the same room listening to us having a conversation like this. They can ask questions. We go out and do talks in the community all the time. 5100 people show up and it's basically, ask the doctors. And people have wonderful questions because they want to know what makes them work the way they do.
And so we really enjoy that because it's usually, unfortunately, most people have ten minutes with their doctor, if that. And if they have more than two problems, the doctor says, I haven't planned on that. Sorry, you're right. Next time. Exactly. Make another appointment. And we don't do a good enough job with health education, so consequently, people go in when it's too late or when something is imminently hurting them, as opposed to preventatively.
Yeah. I hate to say this, but I think a lot of it is from watching television and the movies and all of that, because the only thing that they do stories around are the negative ones. I mean, like crisis, like emergency rooms, like. Thank you. The doctors programs rarely talk about prevention because it doesn't make for very fascinating kind of dialog.
It's much better to have er, you know, really, there's not much to be talked about if you're just looking at an internal medicine doctor having a regular, you know, six month evaluation or follow up with you and say, that's right, Miss Rosen, looking at your blood pressure here, that's pretty good. It's like, yawn. It's much more exciting if you're having a stroke in the office. There you go. Thank you. There you go. There you go. You don't want that drama.
No, no, no. But I truly think that that's part of the problem. And then people get scared if they do have some kind of a problem that they don't know what it is and they don't want to ask the doctor because they're afraid it might actually be serious. But then if it's Syria, I mean, just, you know, I think that's just human nature to a certain degree. Or maybe it's just our culture that does it.
I think we all have a push pull between wanting to know and being afraid of what we might know or what we might have to do about it. We know. That's the bigger thing. I see that with, for example, the one area I see that a lot is in the diagnosis and treatment of obstructive sleep apnea. As you might know, sleep apnea is a condition where people don't breathe well while they sleep. And a lot of people hear sleep apnea and they'll say, well, I sleep just fine.
And I say, you may think you do, and you may find may actually sleep well, but what I'm really interested in is whether or not you're breathing regularly while you're asleep. And then they'll say, well, if I get a test, you may wear those masks. I say, well, let's take this a step at a time.
Let's first find out if you have this, because if you do, it may be responsible for why you're so tired during the day, why you have trouble finding words when you're speaking, why you're inattentive while you're sitting at your job. It may be why you almost fell asleep while you were sitting at the red light the other day during traffic.
And it also may be something that's significantly impacting your risk for memory disorders, your risk for stroke and heart attack, and even the fact that you're taking a little blue pill to have intimacy because erectile dysfunction is related sleep apnea as well. Interesting. Given how important this is, don't you want to find out where we're starting?
Because one night, probably in your own bed with a little gizmo under your nose or on your finger, and we can actually get the answer to this question, and then we'll talk about how we can most effectively help you to treat it. So how you approach it, I think that makes a big difference because people all the time look at me and say, gee, why? Did anyone ever explain that? I say, you know, I really don't know, but it makes a difference when you understand.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's what's really important. That's what we need to be doing more of is helping people to understand, because that's empowering. One of the best things about dementia prevention is when you learn about this, you realize that the research shows that 40% to 60% of cases, one out of two cases of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and other dementias can be prevented. That's huge, both financially and in terms of suffering. But you have to know in order to be able to do that.
And that's the key knowledge. And then bring that into action. No, that makes. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. So is it. I mean, that just brings up, you know, the whole idea of people snoring. Yes, snoring is a big symptom, but you know what else is getting up to go pee several times every night. Turns out that that's also connected. But most people do not understand the physiology behind that, why it's connected. So they blame it on other things.
If you're a woman, you'll probably blame it on childbearing, having weakened your bladder. If you're a man, you'll probably blame it on your prostate. Even though the prostate doesn't cause the urine and even though you probably voided really fully before you went to bed, somehow you say, well, I have some problems voiding during the day, so maybe that's what's causing this. And it may not be. It may simply be that you're not breathing well while you're sleeping.
And consequently your body is trying to adapt to the fact that there's pressure increased in one part of your heart, that it's trying to create urine to pull off fluid that's built up, that builds up in your bladder, wakes you up. You go to the bathroom, you come back an hour or two later, haven't had a thing to drink, you're up again. Where did that urine come from? Well, it came from you. It came from the fluid that was in your body.
So understanding the mechanisms of these things allows us to use that as a potential symptom for figuring out who should get tested. Interesting. Although the reality is based on the most recent research, that if you are in your mid fifties or older, you have a 50% chance of having sleep apnea. One out of two people. This is a large scale study, 6000 people in this study drawn from the general population. One out of two people has sleep apnea.
Diagnosable sleep apnea based on an overnight sleep test. Huge number, most of which is not treated or under treated or no one's explained to people how to treat it well enough so that they follow through with the treatment opportunity that we're missing. That could change the dynamics and the finances of our health system, because many of those people with sleep apnea go on to have cardiovascular problems. They have heart attacks and strokes at a much higher rate than everybody else.
So we need to do more prevention back in that period of time. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, very interesting. So you need to learn about this stuff. That's my whole point. Yeah. Yeah. How do you educate yourself so that you can then take your brain's future into your own hands, so to speak? That's what dementia prevention is really about. Yeah, yeah. And talk clearly and knowingly, I guess. And understanding wise, when you go and talk to your doctor about some of. This stuff, it helps.
The other thing you can do is with this questionnaire that I was talking about, is that there's going to be some things there that are blood tests. There's some answers. For example, you may not know what your hemoglobin a one c is right now. For those who do know, they know that it's related to diabetes levels and that it looks at the percentage of sugar in your bloodstream thats averaged over the last 90 days.
So unlike what your morning glucose levels were, this is an average that usually ranges anywhere from about five upwards. Anything that's over seven is considered to be diabetes. Anything thats six to 7% is considered pre diabetes. What you may not realize is that you have a blood sugar of over a hemoglobin a one c of over seven, your statistical risk of dementia is doubled. Wow. If it's six to 7%, your risk is only 50% higher than normal. So you really don't even want it there.
If you could avoid it, you want to really keep it down in the range of 5% or less. That's hard to do and that's where all the things that go into healthy living really come into play. But diabetes is one of those things that has huge implications for our health and our lifestyles and is a risk factor for dementia. Yeah. So just I have one more question because we really ought to be wrapping up here. So, interesting.
Does a person's chance, if you want to call it that, of developing some kind of dementia related issue? Does it actually get higher the older you get? Or is that just because people don't take as good a care of themselves as they get older? Maybe they don't exercise as much or they're not eating a good diet, or it does get all of that higher. As we get older. If you're in your mid sixties, your risk is about 10%. If you get to be in your mid seventies, your risk is about 20%.
If you get to be in your middle eighties, it gets to be about 40%. So part of the reason we're seeing more of this, part of the reason it's a larger problem societally, is because we as a general population are living longer and living in general healthy ways longer. There's a prolongation of lifespan, but health span, which is a little different, may not be as might not be keeping up with lifespan.
Okay. Okay. So that's why it's really important that we take more of this into our own hands and understand what we're dealing with so that we can think well throughout the very remainder of our life and hopefully also live longer. Yes. Yes. All of that. All of that sounds good to me. For sure. That's the goal. Yes, exactly. So thank you so much for coming on. This has been just so interesting. I'm so eye opening on many different levels.
I'm sure that people who are going to be watching it are going to get a lot out of it. Definitely. Yep. Yep. You know, because, well, because if you're over 50, then that means that your parents are probably over 70. And not only are they going to be worrying about themselves, they're going to be thinking more, I would think probably about their parents as well. So with that being said, let's say that, and this doesn't apply to you, but neither of us are. Neither of us are medical doctors.
None of this should be seen as medical advice. If you're having any issues that sound familiar in our conversation today, then go and see your doctor and get some, some care. And with that, I will thank Mitchell one more time for coming on. It's been very illuminating, and I will be seeing everybody else next week. This has been healthy tips after 50 with Susan Rosin.
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