A tool to help keep dementia in check

If you worry about your risk of dementia, Lauren Sprague knows your fear. Her father had a stroke when she was in high school. What followed was a long, slow descent into memory loss and dementia. He died at just 63. "So, since I was 16 years old, pretty much every day of my life I worry, 'Is today the day that the same thing could happen to me that happened to my dad?'" Sprague said. "It's an incredible fear to walk around with. "Every day of my children's lives up until now, I've worried that that could be me," she said. Then she went to see Dr. Jonathan Rosand, who told us, "Time and again I would get the question, 'Doctor, what can I do to take good care of my brain so that I don't end up like my mother, my brother, my father?'" Rosand is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He explained to Sprague it was possible to cut the risk of dementia by making changes to daily habits, from choices about what you eat, to the amount of physical activity you get every day. "It turns out that these modifiable risk factors probably account for at least 40% of all dementia cases," Rostand said. …