When friends asked me why I highly recommended Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s new book, “Keep Sharp: Build A Better Brain At Any Age,” I said because it’s evidence-based research and communications; easy to read with minimal medical jargons; and written with an optimism for future treatments.
Most people know Dr. Gupta as CNN’s chief medical correspondent, but few are aware that he’s also a practising neurosurgeon. Since 2017, Dr. Gupta has been collaborating with AARP, the leading advocacy group for the mature population in the U.S., which has established the Global Council on Brain Health. The Council brings together scientists, scholars, and policy experts from around the world, with the goal of gathering the best possible advice about what we can do to maintain and improve brain health. Since 2016, the Global Council has brought together 94 experts from 23 different countries and 80 different universities and organizations to reach a consensus on the state of science. Dr. Gupta’s book comprises the wisdom and findings from the Council’s studies.
I read books because I want to learn something new and I’ve got the following key takeaways from this book. What stuck with me most is Dr. Gupta’s grabber right at the beginning: Focus on your brain first, and the rest will come. In other words, when you put your brain first, everything health-wise falls into place. Once you’ve read that, you would immediately pay attention to what the rest of the book has to say.
The brain matures at age 25 but starts to decline at 24. But no matter how old you are (particularly for us boomers), your brain continues to absorb new knowledge and insights, which means you should never stop learning and challenging your thinking.
Dr. Gupta also outlines how dementia happens 30 years earlier before symptoms start to appear. So if you don’t want to have dementia 30 years from now, you’d better take care of your brain as early as possible, preferably more than 30 years before dementia happens.
New research suggests that having a weak sense of smell could be an early warning sign of cognitive decline. People who are losing their hearing are also more susceptible to dementia.
Almost two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s are women, and a woman’s lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer’s at age 65 is one in six (compared to one in 11 for breast cancer). The same situation is true in Canada as well. According to the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada, 72 percent of Canadians living with Alzheimer’s disease are women.
Caregivers of spouses with dementia are up to six times more likely to develop dementia than people in the general population. In fact, anyone who helps care for a loved one with dementia has a higher risk of developing the ailment.
Dr. Gupta also said that vascular dementia can be caused by damaged blood vessels in the brain as a result of diabetes, high blood pressure, or atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).
The five main strategies he offers to protect and heighten your brain function no matter what your age is may not be that new: 1) exercise and movement; 2) sense of purpose, learning, and discovery; 3) sleep and relaxation; 4) nutrition; and 5) social connection.
But the devil is in the details. My key takeaways are: Eat foods of seven colours every day and hydrate with water; if you want to drink wine, limit yourself to one glass of red wine (not white) every day; do 150 minutes of intensive exercise a week, preferably breaking a sweat, and two times a week of strength training. And he pointed out that walking on the golf course does not count as exercise.
What I like most about Dr. Gupta’s new book is that he tries to debunk the common myths of brain health. 1) Multi-tasking is not good for the brain; 2) Napping is not necessarily good for your brain health; 3) Once you are diagnosed with dementia, there’s a lot you can still do to prevent the condition from worsening; 4) Dementia is not necessarily an inevitable consequence of old age; older people can, in fact, learn new things, and doing the crossword puzzle or playing video games flexes only a portion of your brain.
If you believe in preventive medicine like me, this is a good self-help book for you. The book’s main thrust is prevention. Dr. Gupta writes, “clean living can slash your risk of developing a serious mind-destroying disorder, including Alzheimer’s disease, even if you carry genetic risk factors.” He lays out a 12-week “sharp brain” program, consisting of exercise, healthful eating, a bedtime routine, sound sleep, relaxation, intentional socializing, yoga, and a gratitude journal. But I personally think you don’t need to follow his program and timeline – just develop a program that works for you. The book begins with a self-assessment questionnaire for readers to determine whether they are in the high-risk category. But even if you are, Dr. Gupta does not want you to read his book out of fear because he does not believe in fear as a motivation.
What is most promising is the future of treatments or cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. “Blood tests for dementia may come sooner than previously thought – even within the next few years,” he wrote. In 2019, the possibility of a vaccine burst onto the scene after scientists at the University of New Mexico reported on their experiments of inoculating mice with a virus-like particle designed to target tau protein. It remains to be proven whether it will work in humans.
Another team of scientists is hard at work with endobody vaccines – vaccines that prime the immune system to deal with malfunctioning internal parts of the body that it would otherwise ignore. The endobody vaccines essentially provoke an antibody response in the body that clears the tangled plaques without triggering damaging inflammation. Clinical trials are underway to see if this vaccine will have an impact on cognition and memory, but it will probably take years before we know the results.
Dr. Gupta mentioned another group of scientists out of Yale University who have suggested that a “drinkable cocktail of designer molecules” can restore memories in mice engineered to have a condition similar to Alzheimer’s disease. Once again, future research will determine its validity.
In the meantime, governments around the world are looking at ways to manage dementia among their aging populations. The Dutch government has, so far, been a role model in fighting dementia. Hogeweyk, a four-acre gated community which was primarily funded by the Dutch government for slightly more than US$25 million, has been dubbed “Dementia Village” since its opening in 2009. Key lessons learned and best practices are being shared with other international governments interested in providing quality healthcare for dementia patients.
All in all, anyone with a brain needs to be thinking about the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease, NOW. And if we remember the key words of wisdom from the author of this book, “Every day of your life, you can make your brain better, faster, fitter, and sharper, no matter how old you are. Focus on your brain first, and the rest will come.”