The No. 1 Way You Can Reduce Your Risk of Alzheimer’s Today

No need to wait for the FDA. This preventative measure is available right now

Ric Edelman: It's Thursday, April 27th. We've talked recently about Alzheimer's disease. And what I didn't give you then were some of the statistics. In case you're not familiar, I did mention that the odds of getting Alzheimer's by age 90 is 1 in 2. That's rather scary.

But it's even scarier than that. The odds that age 60 are 1 in 10. By age 80, it's 1 in 3. From the time you develop symptoms of Alzheimer's until death is an average of 12 years. This makes Alzheimer's one of the most expensive diseases to treat because patients require typically 24 /7 care, because Alzheimer's patients are often physically fine, which means you can walk around the house, turn on a stove, drive a car, or pick up a firearm. It makes Alzheimer's patients dangerous to themselves and others, and hence the need for 24/7 care. It’s very expensive to provide care at an average of $120,000 a year, $10K a month, which is not covered by Medicare or health insurance.

And as a result, most care providers are family members, your spouse or your child. Typically, a daughter is going to be the one providing that care. And this is why the caregivers themselves suffer massively from a financial perspective. They often have to cut back or entirely give up their careers, spend their own money on providing care. And you can just imagine the emotional and physical toll as well as the financial one. So it's a problem, especially when you consider there's no diagnostic tool to help you determine whether you're likely to develop Alzheimer's. 

Even if you do develop it, there's no treatment, there's no cure, there's no vaccine. It's 100% fatal.

So how would you like to reduce your risk of getting Alzheimer's disease? The number one thing you can do lose weight. New research says obesity causes changes in the brain that are similar to Alzheimer's, especially for people in middle age. Being overweight in your midlife years can cause a whole bunch of health issues decades later. Scientists at McGill University in Montreal analyzed brain scans of 1300 people. It's the first research that directly compares the patterns of brain shrinkage in obese people and in Alzheimer's patients.

And guess what? Obese people have the same kind of thinning of the brain that Alzheimer's patients have. But there's good news. The researchers say that people who are overweight and we're talking about a BMI, a body mass index, of 25 to 26 - if that's you, you might be able to slow your cognitive decline if you can get closer to a healthy weight. And it's not just Alzheimer's disease that you'll improve by lowering your weight - high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis or cancer. You improve your risks on all of those. All of these are connected to obesity. And if you have a higher BMI, you're 2 ½ times more likely to become frail. Being frail puts you at higher risk of falling. That means higher risk of injury, which means hospitalization and complications as a result of being in the hospital. So you're overweight. That means you're frail. That means you trip. And when you do, you break your leg. You end up in the hospital. While you're there, you get sepsis and you die, all because you're eating too much fast food. 

Obesity is considered the top modifiable dementia risk in the United States. And scientists also think that if you already have Alzheimer's or symptoms of dementia, losing weight might actually reverse the damage. There’s one important point the research did not examine: What people are actually eating. It just focused on the fact that they're eating a lot. The assumption is that eating a healthier diet will also improve the situation. So now you know what to do. Don't wait for the scientists to come up with a cure. You can provide your own: improve your weight.  

If you're a financial advisor at 2:00 pm today Eastern, join me for a webinar that I'm hosting in conjunction with Financial Advisor Magazine. The topic is Preparing Your Practice for Success in the Coming Decade. You can't manage your practice over the next 10 years the way you have over the past 10 or 20 years. I'm going to show you what's changed in the field of wealth management. And you're not going to want to miss this today. 2:00 pm for free for financial advisors. The registration link is in the show notes.  

And tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. Eastern, I'm doing a 90-minute virtual roundtable hosted by Bitwise. The topic we're going to be talking about is crypto. This is for RIAs only, not the general public. If you're a financial advisor, you're invited to attend. Here’s the registration link.

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