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by m3kw9 862 days ago
Now is there something that can be done early or is it 15 extra years of suffering
3 comments

From what I understand, the medicine available is fairly successful at staving off further disease progression but the normal late stage diagnosis often means it’s far too late. This might make outcomes significantly better if it works as well as reported.
That is true for some diseases but not all. I don't think we know how to prevent dementia. But identifying biomarkers is useful, at the very least for selecting people for enrollment in future trials.
the medicine available is just cherry picking clinical trial results to make it look better than placebo but it hardly does anything
The article states there are medications that can slow or reverse the disease, if the disease is diagnosed early enough.

"An early diagnosis is critical for those with dementia. New drug technology can slow, or even reverse the progress of Alzheimer’s, but only if the disease is detected early enough. The drug lecanemab is one of two new treatments for the disease."

Probably diet and exercise. Would be interesting to see an interventional study based on this.
Sleep, maybe meditation, keep learning new challenging stuff (within given cognitive possibilities).

Brain is a 'muscle' so keep pushing at it, continuously, you can only help it.

That's like weight-lifting to prevent ALS. Dementia has multiple (suspected) causes, and they are unrelated to cognitive activity. There's no evidence you can prevent plaques or cardio-vascular damage by reading or puzzling, AFAIK.
Fwiw, at least one recent study indicates there is little benefit from exercising your brain: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...

related news article (in Norwegian): https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/forskning-viser-at-hjernetrim-o...