Inheriting Dementia and What You Can Do About It

When one parent has dementia, your risk of developing the dementia triples. But what if both of your parents have it? Surprisingly, the increased risk is not known and the data is scarce. The Alzheimer's Association does not track the instances of when both couples have the disease. The New York Times recently touched on this largely ignored phenomenon, which is likely to become more and more common as the baby boom bubble enters the high risk years of later life.

Here are some of the issues involved:

1. The increased anxiety that grown children have about developing the disease when both parents have it.

2. The question of whether the stress placed on the spouse providing care for the first of the couple to develop dementia has some accelerating effect on their own development of dementia.

3. The importance of investigating elder care options in advance when one parent shows symptoms.

Whether it is one parent or two (or no parents), one does not have to be powerless in facing dementia in the future. Even though there is no known cure and treatment options are limited, there are currently great strides being made in our understanding of the disease. An adult in their 50s or 60s could be decades away from developing dementia which provides a lot of time for new treatments to be discovered. If you want to help the cause, consider donating to Alzheimer's Association or another non-profit in this area.

In addition, there are a number of lifestyle risk factors that have been identified with increased Alzheimer's and dementia. Controllable activities such as smoking and diet have been show to correlate with dementia and these are things that you can immediately change in your life. Read the articles in LifeTwo's Brain Health section for more information on what you can do.

Finally, there is increasing scientific support for the belief that "brain fitness" can help maintain mental agility in later years by building up a "cognitive reserve" of healthy neurons. Whether these will prove to help dementia sufferers has yet to be fully established, but if you are worried about your cognitive abilities later in life then it might make sense to understand more about what is happening in this field. SharpBrains is a website dedicated to cognitive health.

In short you aren't powerless as you face your own cognitive future. But you shouldn't be complacent either, and this is true whether one, both, or none of your parents has the disease.