People who do this one thing have HALF the risk of Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias currently kill 6.5 million people in the United States and destroy many times the lives of the patients’ friends and family. The National Institutes of Health projects that this number is likely to double in the next four decades.

The last study showed that people in their 70s had almost a one in three chance of getting this terrible brain disease before they died, and it was a study of people born in the 1920s. Those born later, who are likely to live longer, face an even higher risk.

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Meanwhile, the amount the federal government spends each year on research to fight this disease is less than 0.1% of the amount it spent over two years fighting COVID. Or, put another way, at current rates, it will take Uncle Sam more than 1,000 years to spend as much on Alzheimer’s research as he spent on fighting COVID-19. Meanwhile, a new scandal has raised questions about how much dementia research over the past 15 years was based on flawed data.

So I’ll take the good news where I can get it, and some very encouraging new data has just been published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Neurology.

In a nutshell: Just walking a lot more can do a lot to reduce our risk of developing dementia. It could actually reduce our risk in half.

And remarkably, the ideal goal is around 9,800 steps a day: in other words, just shy of the magical 10,000 steps a day — a number apparently plucked out of the blue by the marketing department of a Japanese watch company decades ago.

Strange, but true.

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The latest findings were based on a survey of almost 80,000 people in the UK over several years. They involved comparing actual data from pedometers, such as Fitbits, worn by subjects with follow-up seven years later.

“In this cohort study, a higher number of steps was associated
with lower risk of all-cause dementia,” the authors report. “The findings suggest that a dose of just under 10,000 steps per day may optimally be associated with a lower risk of dementia. Steps performed at higher intensity resulted in stronger associations.”

Those who walked 3,800 steps a day had a 25% lower risk of developing dementia in the study. Those who walked 9,800 had a 50% lower risk. Those who walked at least 6,000 steps and who walked reasonably briskly for about half an hour a day were 62% less likely to develop dementia.

In the real world, of course, there are all sorts of caveats. How far do we look at correlation or causation? Will other studies find similar things? If the follow-ups were only seven years later, what would the long-term numbers show?

We’ll have to keep up with more research, as usual. In the meantime, I’ll take what I can get. I bought a $25 pedometer for my wrist from Amazon a few years ago. It is quickly becoming my best health investment.

There are three key points from the research.

The first is that the benefits of walking really seem to kick in if you average at least 3,800 steps a day.

The second is that the optimal average is around 9,800.

And the third is that just casually wandering around doesn’t give you the full benefit. For maximum benefit, we should try to walk “purposefully” at a speed of “112 steps per minute” for at least half an hour a day.

Humans, of course, spent most of the last million years walking a lot every day, eating unprocessed foods, and fasting a lot when there was no food around. It’s probably no coincidence that despite all the gazillions spent on advanced medical techniques, we’re slowly rediscovering that our bodies really want to walk a lot, eat unprocessed food, and fast a lot.

There you can just see?