The Longevity Podcast: Optimizing HealthSpan & MindSpan

Send us Fan Mail How common is dementia among older Americans, and who carries the heaviest burden? This study used the 2023 National Health and Aging Trends Study, a nationally representative sample of 7,574 older adults, to estimate probable and possible dementia and the factors tied to it. Older age, less education, stroke, falls, and depression or anxiety went with higher odds, while vision co...

Send us Fan Mail Can your heart-risk score hint at how fast your memory and thinking may change? In this editorial, Dr. Maileen Ulep looks at a rural U.S. study (Project FRONTIER) that used the American Heart Association's PREVENT equations to estimate 10-year cardiovascular risk. Each 10-point rise in that risk went with about one extra point of yearly decline on a standard memory and thinki...

Send us Fan Mail New disease-modifying therapies are changing Alzheimer's care, but the trials behind them rarely measured frailty, the loss of physical reserve that is common in older adults with Alzheimer's. In this review, a group of European geriatricians and neurologists explains what frailty is and how it's measured, why it may affect safety and benefit, and the open questions...

Send us Fan Mail Did omega-3 supplement use really go along with faster memory decline in older adults? After two letters challenged their ADNI-based study, study authors Liao and Wang reply point by point: how supplement use was measured, which confounders were and weren't covered, why their result differs from earlier work on the same data, and what their brain-scan findings can and can&apo...

Send us Fan Mail Did omega-3 supplements really speed up memory decline in older adults? A recent study using the ADNI cohort suggested they might, contradicting earlier work on the same data that linked omega-3 use to lower Alzheimer's risk. In this letter to the editor, researchers Simon Dyall and Mélanie Plourde dig into why: large amounts of missing data, limited adjustment for key dement...

Send us Fan Mail What do people in their 40s, 50s, and early 60s with mild cognitive impairment actually do to protect their brain health, and what gets in the way? This scoping review from University College Dublin screened 6,349 records and mapped 17 studies from Asia, Europe, North America, and Africa. Strategies fell into two groups: structured programs such as aerobic exercise, dance, cogniti...

Send us Fan Mail How often does dementia show up in older adults who live at home but need advanced care such as tube feeding, breathing support, catheters, stoma or enema care, wound or pain care, or dialysis? A nationwide survey in Taiwan visited 11,297 community-dwelling older adults between 2020 and 2022. About 6.5% received at least one kind of advanced care, and in that group dementia was mo...

Send us Fan Mail New anti-amyloid antibody treatments for early Alzheimer's are now authorized in Europe, but how many patients in a real memory clinic actually qualify? A team in Modena, Italy, applied the Italian appropriate use recommendations step by step to all 1,080 patients seen at their cognitive neurology clinic in 2024 and 2025. Of those, 596 had mild cognitive impairment or mild Al...

Send us Fan Mail Can the conditions of everyday life, like money, stress, schooling, neighborhood, and access to care, leave a mark on the brain by age 40? Using the CARDIA study, researchers built a 12-item social determinants of health index across five domains and followed 3,488 adults from early midlife, 645 of them with repeated brain MRI. People in the most disadvantaged group already scored...

Send us Fan Mail Can loneliness, depression, and stress make your body age faster on the inside? Researchers pooled 22 studies of adults from midlife onward that measured "epigenetic age," a biological age estimated from DNA methylation patterns in blood. Greater loneliness, depression, and psychosocial stress were each linked to faster epigenetic aging, most consistently on newer clocks...

Send us Fan Mail At what age does measurable thinking decline actually begin? Researchers pooled long-term data on 14,389 adults aged 22 to 94 from three population studies in China, the United States, and the Czech Republic, putting different cognitive tests on a common 0 to 100 scale and following people for an average of seven to nine years. A small but detectable drop in overall cognition firs...

Send us Fan Mail The choroid plexus is the tissue inside the brain's ventricles that makes cerebrospinal fluid and helps clear waste. Earlier imaging studies found it grows larger across the Alzheimer's continuum, but few had checked that against autopsy, the gold standard for diagnosis. Toronto researchers used National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center data on 111 people who had a b...

Send us Fan Mail Special care units for people with dementia who have agitation and other behavioral symptoms offer a home-like setting with specialized staff. But are they worth the money? The European RECage study followed 508 people for three years across Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, France, and Greece, comparing those cared for in these units with those who were not. Over three years,...

Send us Fan Mail Machine learning can forecast how fast thinking skills will slip — but how well do those models work on a new group of patients? Researchers in Zurich trained models on ADNI (1,237 people) and OASIS-3 (662 people) to predict yearly change in CDR-SOB and MMSE scores. Adding structural MRI to clinical and demographic data improved predictions inside each dataset (R² up to about 0.41...

Send us Fan Mail Can the shape of your brain's memory center reveal risk that amyloid tests miss? Researchers at UC Irvine studied MRI scans and up to 10 years of follow-up in 1,142 dementia-free older adults from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Smaller overall hippocampal volume tracked with worse thinking and faster decline in every area tested. But a bigger size diffe...

Send us Fan Mail Could a routine eye exam one day flag Alzheimer's disease? Because the retina is an extension of the brain, this study used a genetic method called Mendelian randomization, drawing on large genetic datasets and more than 52,000 UK Biobank participants, to sort out which eye changes Alzheimer's actually causes. Genetic risk for Alzheimer's was linked to more twisted...

Send us Fan Mail Enlarged perivascular spaces, the fluid-filled channels around small blood vessels in the brain, show up on routine MRI. This study of 307 people with cognitive impairment from a Seoul dementia cohort asked whether amyloid and blood vessel disease leave different patterns of these spaces. Vascular burden was linked to more enlarged spaces deep in the basal ganglia, regardless of a...

Send us Fan Mail How do clinicians tell mild dementia from moderate dementia? This study tested the Functional Activities Questionnaire, an informant-based checklist of everyday tasks, in more than 34,000 people from the US NACC database and confirmed the results in the ADNI and FTLDNI cohorts. A score of 18 or higher caught 96% of moderate dementia cases, while a cut-off of 23 traded a little sen...

Send us Fan Mail Using amyloid and tau PET scans from two US cohorts, ADNI and the Harvard Aging Brain Study, researchers estimated how long it takes to go from amyloid positivity to tau positivity. That interval varied widely and was shorter in APOE4 carriers, women, and people who became amyloid positive at older ages. A shorter amyloid-to-tau interval predicted earlier symptom onset, pointing t...

Send us Fan Mail A gut bacterial compound called imidazole propionate (ImP) is linked to Alzheimer's-related brain changes and faster cognitive decline in a large Wisconsin cohort, with mouse and cell studies pointing to barrier and tau pathways. Researchers measured blood ImP in nearly 1,200 mostly cognitively unimpaired adults, connected ImP-producing gut bacteria to disease markers, and fo...

Send us Fan Mail A Mendelian randomization study of plasma proteins, structural MRI measures, and Alzheimer's disease risk found 12 neuroimaging metrics and 1,633 proteins with causal ties to AD. Brain imaging also mediated about 67% of the link between the immune-related protein PTPRC and Alzheimer's risk across the disease course. Source: Xu X, et al., Bidirectional causal relationship...

Send us Fan Mail A China-wide survey of 1,057 older adults with Alzheimer's or related cognitive impairment found 73.5% had at least one safety incident in the past year, and over a third reported three or more. Medication errors and verbal aggression were the most common, followed by falls and physical aggression. Medication errors and getting lost also sat at the center of how different inc...

Send us Fan Mail A letter in JPAD argues that a reported safety advantage for an anti-amyloid antibody drug, in a European-label subgroup of its phase 3 trial, may largely reflect excluding patients on blood thinners. About one in four people with Alzheimer's take those medicines in real-world data, so the subgroup findings may not apply in everyday practice. Source: Ijaz A, Mohyudin G, The g...

Send us Fan Mail A letter responds to a large review of public dementia risk awareness, arguing that recognizing a risk factor is not the same as knowing what to do about it. The authors urge surveys to measure actionable knowledge, whether risks are personal habits or policy problems, and to separate fear and stigma from true risk perception. Source: Xie Z, Su J, Liao T, Beyond recognition: Refin...

Send us Fan Mail When Europe approved donanemab and lecanemab, the label was narrower than the trials: early Alzheimer's, APOE ε4 non-carriers or heterozygotes, plus extra exclusions. This editorial walks through why EU-eligible subgroup analyses matter—and how Jessen's TRAILBLAZER-ALZ 2 re-analysis shows benefit and safety still hold (even improve a bit) in the patients clinicians actua...