Lead Author Becca Levy aforementioned that the primary study, published on February, 2018 in PLOS ONE, suggested that positivity towards ageing may serve as protective factor against dementia. A study conducted by the experts at Yale University, involving more than 4,000 adults, aged 60 and over, stated that those involved patients who were concluded as positive individuals toward ageing were shown to have 43.6% lower risk of developing dementia, compared to those who had negative outlook.
In the other hand, the genetically predisposed patients, especially the 26% of them who were believed to be carriers of the gene variant named APOE-e4 (one of the principal factors of dementia), who, at the same time, had positivity towards ageing were determined to have 49.8% lower risk of developing dementia. In addition, Scientists believed that 47% of the carrier patients of APOE-e4 developed the disorder and the rest 53% did not, although the sole reason was still unknown.
Factors That Affects the Attitude of a Patient
According to Professor Levy, factors like age, education, sex, race, other ailments such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, baseline cognitive performance, especially stress may influence the results of their attitude, or even its contribution in developing dementia. In connection to stress, Dr. Linda Mah from University of Toronto said that “Pathological anxiety and chronic stress are related with structural irregular functioning of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (damaged functions such as memory, decision-making and establishing social bonds), that can expand the risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders like dementia.”
Evaluation on the Patient’s Attitude
4, 765 ‘dementia free’ American adults, mostly aged 72, were invited by Dr. Levy and her colleagues to operate an evaluation on the impact of positivity towards ageing to the lower risk of dementia occurrence. Through the use of ‘Attitude toward Ageing’ scale, the experts were able to asked whether the patients showed positivity toward aging; each of them were asked about the degree to which they agreed or not with the idea of ‘feeling useless while getting older’. Professor Levy added that the scores of each participant could indicate their attitude towards ageing.
However, Professor Henry Brodaty, co-director of the the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing at the University of New South Wales stated that the diagnostic tool was not the gold standard for evaluating dementia because there are some issues about it like its being proxy for a proper clinical assessment.
Instead, he suggested that it would be better to duplicate and enhance the study, and probably to create an intervention trial in order to clearly examine the relationship of positivity towards ageing to the risk of developing dementia.
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