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Have You Had a Brain-health Check-up Lately?
In this article:
- Senior moments are not a joke
- Alzheimer's begins 10 to 20 years before it's diagnosed
- If you lose your mind, you don't get it back
You are concerned about the health and fitness of your body, how good your appearance is, and how well you can compete with those around you. You are concerned about your sexual function and sexual drive, but how about a little concern and worry about the place where those things originate - your brain. Without optimal brain function and with deterioration of brain processes, there's not a lot of good things going on. You may have a wonderfully fit and healthy body and take no medication for any kind of disease; but, if you can't remember how to use it, or remember where home is, or who the person beside you in bed is, then you are in real trouble, and everything else will head south soon. The car has to have a driver and the ship has to have a captain. That's really you, your brain/mind. You have to keep it healthy or nothing else matters. The really unfortunate reality is that we will go to our physician for some minor aches or pains, but we won't end up in our doctor's office unless someone else notices something is wrong with our brain function, most commonly our memory. We just blame that slow thought processing or "senior moment" on "It's just because I'm __years old and I'm getting older."
As a society, we will ignore memory and slowing of thought processing for a long time before we ask for help or someone sends us for help to our physician. Often the first thing that brings the patient to the doctor is aberrant, disturbing behavior, such as accusing a spouse of being unfaithful, claiming a close relative is stealing from him/her, or wandering off at night and getting lost. Unfortunately, by that time a lot of the horses (in this case, brain cells) are already out of the barn and we cannot get them back. However, with some of the new medications and interventions, we can slow the process down to a crawl, and maintain the patient at a consistent level of function until some type of cure is developed.
Remember, 50% of the population 85 years old and older has Alzheimer's disease. As long as I live, I am planning on optimal cognitive/brain/mind function if at all possible, and will use all the medical, evidence-based tools to acquire and maintain optimal function throughout my lifespan. That is also what I want to accomplish for my patients.
The treatment is like the important factor in real estate. Instead of being "Location, location, location," it is "Early, early, early." We can stop or substantially delay the degenerative brain disease, but we cannot get back what you have lost.
I practiced Neurology for thirty years before actively entering the field of Age Management Medicine, and one of the things that caused me the most sadness and frustration was to see an otherwise healthy 45 to 55 year old, active, intelligent person, who literally had trouble recognizing his or her spouse, and about whose disease I could do very little. I always thought that if I could have gotten to him/her early, I might have been able to do something to prevent or slow the degeneration. It was because of that type of patient that I became very interested in the possible prevention of degenerative disease, and began to study and research possible avenues of proactive treatment, in order to prevent, stop or delay those degenerative processes early in their course, and allow my patients to retain optimal function for as long s possible.
Here at the NeuroMedical Institute for Age Management, we take brain health very seriously, and not for granted. We do EEGs (Electroencephalograms/brain wave tests) and other tests for brain function to try to catch any hint of deterioration early. There are now some effective proactive interventions we can use, when indicated.
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Age Management Topics
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About the Institute
