It is World Alzheimer’s Month, and we continue to bring awareness to this disease that has no cure, but many treatments can help slow the progression.
Doctors say they are seeing the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease lowered by taking this one small step towards better health.
Certain vaccines can actually help lower the risk significantly.
“When we look through, like, the whole Herman system at who gets vaccinated and who doesn’t, those that get vaccinated have a significantly reduced risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease for at least eight years. That’s as far as we’ve been able to follow them so far,” says Memorial Hermann Hospital and UT Health professor of neurology, Dr. Paul Schulz.
“We should get it because the flu can be deadly, but it turns out that if you get the flu vaccine three times over six years, there’s a twenty percent reduced risk of getting Alzheimer’s, and if you get it six times over six years, there’s a forty percent reduced risk of Alzheimer’s for eight years,” added Dr. Paul Schulz.
Doctors found that if they can control a patient’s blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar, they can get physical and mental exercise, these are the first easy treatments that you can begin now to lower your risk even more.
“So if we catch someone a little later, they slow a certain amount, but if we catch someone really early, they’ll slow by a lot.
call disease-modifying therapy. Those are treatments that actually remove amyloid from the brain; they remove all the amyloid plaques that we can see in the brain, and that’s associated with significant slowing of the progression of the disease,” says Dr. Paul Schulz.
Doctors add that the T-Dap vaccine, which we got as kids and every ten years after, is associated with a reduced risk of about 25 percent.
The pneumococcal vaccine and the shingles vaccine can also lower your risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, as well.
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