Risk factors for dementia

Preventable for some

There’s hope when recent studies show more understanding of dementia, new ways of treating it, of preventing it. But there’s also my heart falling, knowing it’s too late for my father, he’s too far gone.

A report published in The Lancet last year told us about two newly discovered risk factors for dementia: untreated vision loss and high low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, a.k.a. ‘bad’ cholesterol.

The bad cholesterol hardens the blood vessels in the heart and the brain, making it more difficult for oxygen to reach them, and causing the brain neurons to gradually die out. I can’t help but think of the Numskulls in my daughter’s Beano in their little rooms in Edd’s head gradually suffocating, dropping like flies.

I wonder what difference it makes knowing that my father was diagnosed with surprisingly high cholesterol after a regular check-up way back in his forties, if it helps me to know this.

A doctor quoted in the Huffington Post talking about these discoveries said: “what affects your heart will affect your brain”. These words seem so profound to me.

These two new risk factors can be added to the list of twelve others they had already found in 2020. This list includes so many that don’t apply to my father: physical inactivity (he did regular exercise throughout his life), less education (he’s highly educated), obesity (he’s always been lanky like me), smoking (he’s never smoked).

I do have to pause at air pollution because we live in London, and the pollution here has been literally proven to have caused the death of a child.

I look around at the hazy air of this strange heatwave we’re having in London right now and wonder if it’s gradually killing me. Or is it the sugar in the biscuits that I shove in my gob when the children are screaming at each other? Are poisons all around me and in me, seeping in and thickening the pipes in the obscurity of my body?

I try not to dwell on the anger that rises in my throat on reading that every single one of these risk factors for dementia is preventable.

Every.

Single.

One.

And yet here we are, living with the ongoing grief of dementia. It comes in waves, the grief, as grief does, and it changes as his condition changes. It’s a grief that begins long before a funeral has even been planned. There’s been no celebration of life. I’m not considered to be bereaved. But I am.

I suppose I must go to the doctor and get my cholesterol checked. If I ever have a moment between childcare and work and visiting my father and relentlessly reading articles about dementia.

When I look back at the last few years before we realised what was happening to my father, I can see that he’d not quite been himself for a while in ways that we put down to simply getting older, getting out less, being in Covid lockdown.

I believe that a cruel aspect of dementia is that it pushes the person with it to cover it up. It bends the brain to protect itself, like a parasite, creating the conditions where it can breed without being stopped.

If you think you have dementia, you should immediately talk to a doctor and get on the meds to slow it down, which you can do nowadays if you act early enough.

But who has heard of anyone who actually does act early with dementia?

Isn’t everybody’s story one of realising too late?

Oh my heart, oh my brain.