United States: The American Academy of Neurology (AAN) suggests that the time has come to focus on the brain because the age of preventive brain health has already arrived.
As per the expectations of the academy, all Americans would be on the healthy brain train by 2050.
Dr. Natalia Rost, associate director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said, “It’s a brain health revolution,” and “We want to help the public understand that a lifetime of health begins with brain health,” reported CNN Health.
The academy envisions that in the next 25 years, the children and grandchildren of the present generation will visit the doctor for their yearly “well-brain” checkups, which will comprise preventive care paid for by insurance. In fact, that first visit might happen even before a child is even conceived!
Rost added, “We want major insurance payers to cover a well-brain visit as early as when Mom is considering pregnancy or is pregnant,” and, “Then when baby is born, we bring in pediatric neonatologists, and then we follow the child into adolescence using all we are learning about the optimization of brain function.”
Interventions can also be promoting moms-to-be to breastfeed for as long as possible, limiting child exposure to screens, better sleep behaviors that, in turn, can be passed on throughout the life stages, and so on.
With aging, for each brain checkup, early prevention of the diseases known to damage the brain, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, is considered first, as reported by CNN Health.
According to Roast, those visits would continue “into end-of-life stages because even as we age or acquire a cognitive disease, we can still optimize brain health while living with brain disorders.”
A new program about studying the brain
The Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases of Florida has launched a new program, which would include a novel clinical trial focussing on nurturing the aging brain.
The study would determine the genetic, behavioral, and lifestyle risks for cognitive decline. It would also give a personalized list of areas to improve that could be tracked over time with the new, experimental type of blood tests.
This set of unique blood tests could find the levels of amyloid, tau, and other hallmark biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and other degenerative conditions. Amyloid deposits start accumulating in the brain at the age of 30 or 40 when symptoms of the disease begin, reported CNN Health.
Isaacson and his outlined healthy plant-based diet — behaviors in a recent review published in Nature.
Isaacson said, “The study allows the public to access software that walks them through a free risk assessment, memory and cognitive tests, and personalized advice from the comfort of their cell phones,” and “These types of digital brain health resources could potentially be used until the field of preventive neurology develops more broadly.”