[iwalton3]

I have a kind of outlandish hypothesis that needs more research before it can be taken seriously, but it basically says that the cause and effect are backwards. Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first. The sleep down regulation and decay of mental circuitry comes after. Would explain why treating the physical symptoms doesn't work.

Protective against the problem is anything which keeps you mentally active, such as socialization, work, religious community participation, hobbies, and meditation. Retirement, death of partner, isolation, sleep deprivation, depression, dissociation, psychosis, medications/drugs which interfere with restful sleep increase risk.

A possible falsification of this hypothesis would be if it's caused by inactivity or physical self neglect, as those often go hand in hand with the correlated and anti-correlated factors mentioned above.

This is particularly interesting:

> Intriguingly, studies show conscientiousness and neuroticism to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias but not with their pathologic hallmarks such as plaques, tangles, infarcts or Lewy bodies in the brain.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7484344/

[tempest_]

> Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first.

Except early onset Alzheimers happens and it also happens to plenty of people for which none of those are true.

[iwalton3]

I mentioned this could be a possible falsification of the idea. It's also possible there are multiple causes and the modality I mentioned is a cause for some. I'm not sure. There are definitely cases where isolation contributes to cognitive decline.

[matwood]

Exactly. My mom lost her job because of early onset. She was very social, read tons of books, etc…. Now, I’m happy she at least still knows who am, but she can’t put a sentence together.

[josh-wrale]

Example: Claude Shannon

[wonnage]

This isn’t a hypothesis, it’s a wild unsubstantiated guess

[iwalton3]

A hypothesis is an unverified tentative insight into something which could be true. Current research is correlating dementia with a wide variety of areas including even personality typologies which are nothing more than statistical clusters of observations.

What I did when I stated this is looked at a number of observations from current literature and asked a what-if question. People unwilling to ask these questions are blinding themselves to entire areas of possible explanations. My hope when posting this was that people might engage with the idea instead of calling it a guess. Retirement, isolation from pandemic lockdowns, isolation from solitary imprisonment, and isolation from death of a partner are all associated with cognitive decline.

There's enough correlation here that it would be worth researching. That's all I am saying, I am specifically not saying my claim is factual just that it is a possible explanation that if true would explain a lot.