Scientists think that up to 45% of our dementia risk factors are “potentially modifiable.”
For instance, smoking, leaving high blood pressure untreated, and not exercising may well increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
Still, you might feel you’re doing your best to keep your brain healthy but are unsure how successful your efforts really are.
If that’s the case, you might want to try finding your Brain Care Score via a short online test.
The test checks your physical, mental, and emotional health, giving you a score based on your answers. It was created by Massachusetts General Hospital’s McCance Brain Centre and takes about five minutes.
It’s been included in some studies, like this one in Frontiers of Psychiatry that found a five-point improvement was associated with a 27% reduction in the likelihood a person would develop dementia.
A later follow-up study published in Nature found that those with a higher Brain Care score were less likely to have brain-based conditions like stroke or dementia, even when they were genetically predisposed to those conditions.
“We know that certain adjustments can reduce risk of stroke, dementia, depression and other brain diseases,” the McCance Brain Centre writes on their site.
“Yet, unlike heart care and cancer prevention, brain care has traditionally not been considered in preventative health.”
Incidentally, what is good for the heart is generally good for the brain too. That’s why some of the markers on the Brain Score test (like blood pressure, smoking status, and diet) will seem familiar to those who’d taken a heart health risk test.
You can take the test online through this link.
If you’re worried about your results, you can speak to your doctor about them (the test allows you to download your brain score as a PDF and print them out if you like; you can also screenshot them).
They’ll be able to talk about small steps you can take to improve your score.
The McCance Brain Centre also has a list of ways to look after your brain according to your biggest risk factors, stressing that almost nobody has a perfect score.
