Guo is 58 years old this year, and as he gets older, he feels that his memory is deteriorating day by day. Just a few months ago, the neighbor Lao Wang was found to have Alzheimer's disease, forgot things from time to time, and even went out a few days ago and got lost, making the family worried that it was broken, and the police looked for half a day to find it. Lao Wang's situation made Lao Guo also worried, Lao Guo actually began to have symptoms of not remembering recently, so he also began to fear that he would also get Alzheimer's disease.
So Lao Guo collected a lot of methods on the Internet and decided to start trying. He began to exercise actively and went for a morning jog every day, while Lao Guo also made a healthy eating plan for himself, strictly following the diet plan to supplement body nutrition. In addition, he often went for a walk in the park, met a lot of friends, often chatted with them, danced square dances, and after a long time, Lao Guo felt that his mentality had become much better, and the problems of forgetting things before rarely appeared.
As you grow older, are middle-aged and elderly friends also beginning to worry about Alzheimer's disease? Do you also want to know what to do to delay brain aging and prevent Alzheimer's disease? Today's article, the doctor will answer for everyone, for everyone's old age life to reduce a worry!
First, these factors will accelerate brain aging
Brain aging is the basis of neurodegenerative diseases, so when does the brain start aging? In fact, the number of brain cells has been determined since birth, they are in a state of continuous death, and do not proliferate.
And according to research, the brain begins to age much earlier than we think, and after the age of 20, the brain will no longer develop and begin to enter the aging period. Brain aging is irreversible, but there are certain factors in life that can accelerate brain aging, so we need to keep it in mind!
First of all, high blood sugar, high blood lipids, and high blood pressure are the most common causes of accelerated brain aging.
High blood sugar, high blood lipids, high blood pressure will lead to brain microvascular sclerosis, long-term blood sugar, blood pressure, high blood lipids will also lead to cerebral vascular occlusion, blood viscosity increase and so on.
Cerebral vascular blockage will cause oxygen to be unable to be transported to brain cells in time, maintain brain cell life activities, resulting in long-term hypoxia of the brain, brain cells can not obtain enough oxygen for physiological metabolic activities, may lead to accelerated aging of brain cells, in addition, even increase the risk of brain diseases.
Secondly, irregular physiological work and rest can also lead to accelerated aging of the brain.
Irregular living habits will cause the time pattern of the brain's "work" to be disrupted, affecting normal body metabolic activities, and indirectly affecting the operation of the brain. Moreover, irregular life and rest can also cause the brain to be in an excited state at night, damage brain neuronal cells, and lead to brain neurological degeneration.
In addition to this, smoking is the fastest factor that accelerates brain aging.
The nicotine in cigarettes usually enters the brain within 8 seconds of inhalation, and will continue to maintain activity for about 30 minutes, during which it will continue to attack brain blood vessels and brain cells, resulting in hardening of the blood vessels, and at the same time deprivation of brain cells, thus causing the brain's thinking ability to weaken and accelerate the brain aging process.
Therefore, it is important to maintain good habits in daily life so that the brain can always be kept young. So what exactly do we need to do? Don't worry, in the following part, the doctor will introduce you to these effective ways to delay brain aging!
Second, often do these 5 things, the brain does not age!
(1) Exercise more
The normal operation of the brain requires oxygen, and the lack of oxygen can easily lead to accelerated death of brain cells, thus leading to memory loss. In order to provide more oxygen to the brain, it can be achieved by accelerating blood circulation and increasing blood oxygen levels.
Insisting on exercise can promote blood circulation, while increasing blood oxygen content, providing sufficient oxygen for brain cells, accelerating their self-metabolism, thereby enhancing memory to a certain extent.
(2) Take no more than one hour's nap every day
Researchers have analyzed data from the U.S. Memory and Age Research Project to find out whether there is an interaction between napping and the brain. Napping enhances the functioning of the brain, while the continuous work of the brain promotes sleepiness in napping.
Studies have found that older adults who sleep more than one hour a day at noon are 40% more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease (what we often call Alzheimer's) than those who sleep less than one hour; People who nap for less than an hour are nearly 60 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.
It can be seen that a proper nap can improve the cognitive ability of the brain and delay the aging of the brain, but the time should not be too long, not more than 1 hour.
The function of napping is to allow the brain to rest in the continuous work of the day, which is conducive to the self-repair of brain cells. But if the nap time is too long, the human body will enter deep sleep, resulting in sleepier sleep, and it is difficult to wake up, so the best sleep time should be about 30 minutes.
(3) Reduce negative emotions
Scientific studies have shown that a positive and healthy mental state can regulate the body's metabolism and have a good effect on blood circulation. negative
Facial emotions usually cause a stress response in the brain, releasing stress hormones that cause irreversible damage to cortical cells, block nerve pathways, and eventually lead to brain atrophy.
Therefore, we should maintain a good attitude in life, so as to reduce the impact of negative emotions on brain thinking and delay brain aging.
(4) Eat more foods containing magnesium
The journal "European Nutrition" has published a study that shows that the more magnesium consumed in the daily diet, the more conducive to delaying brain aging and improving behavioral cognition.
Through experiments, the researchers also found that people who consumed 550mg of magnesium per day were nearly 1 year younger at the age of 55 than people who consumed 350mg per day (normal people's intake content), thus confirming that magnesium has the ability to delay brain aging.
Magnesium is an indispensable trace element in the human body, and appropriately increasing magnesium intake is conducive to increasing brain capacity, and also has the effect of reducing white matter lesions.
Magnesium-rich foods include grapes, bananas, oranges, lemons, spinach, cabbage, peppers, etc., and you can appropriately increase the intake of these magnesium-rich foods in your daily diet according to your own needs.
(5) Maintain enough night's sleep
Sleep is the basis of the human body to maintain normal physical and psychological functions, lack of sleep usually affects the functioning of the brain, and sleep quality decline is a common feature of aging, on the contrary, sleep reduction will also increase the speed of aging, the normal sleep time of the elderly should be maintained at about 6-8 hours to maintain a normal mental state during the day.
After the brain has worked uninterruptedly during the day, it needs to rest through sleep at night, which also plays a certain role in maintaining and improving memory and restoring brain plasticity. Brain plasticity is the brain's ability to work and repair nerves, and lack of sleep often leads to reduced neuroplasticity. In addition, nighttime sleep can also clean up the garbage (such as β-amyloid, adenosine, etc.) produced by physiological activities and metabolism of the brain throughout the day to ensure brain capacity.
Memories are mainly stored in the hippocampus, and in order to store memories for a long time, memories need to be temporarily stored in the hippocampus and then transported to the neodermal keratin responsible for long-term storage of memories, a process that usually needs to be carried out during sleep.
Reading this, everyone may have a trace of doubt, is memory really irreversible? Is it really impossible for the brain to recover once it ages? In fact, just last year, some research found a new method of "rejuvenation" to enhance brain repair, although it has not yet been put into clinical trials, but it provides new hope for Alzheimer's disease and the elderly group! Let's take a look at this study together.
Third, the latest research has found a new method of "rejuvenation"
Stanford University published a study in the famous academic journal "Nature", which immediately caused a sensation in the academic community. Studies say that injecting young cerebrospinal fluid into the elderly brain can improve memory ability, and may provide new ideas for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, which is not solved!
In this study, the researchers extracted the cerebrospinal fluid of young mice and injected it into the brains of elderly mice, and found that young cerebrospinal fluid can reverse the memory degeneration decline of the elderly brain and play a certain role in promoting the improvement of memory. Cerebrospinal fluid is actually the fluid present in the brain and spinal cord, which buffers the brain and spinal cord, which is conducive to promoting brain development and brain cell repair.
In the experiment, the researchers gave three electric shocks to the right feet of 20 20-month-old mice, and under the action of a flash, the mice repeatedly remembered this fear, forming a conditioned reflex. They then extracted young cerebrospinal fluid from 3-month-old mice and injected them into the brains of 10 old mice, while the other 10 were just given normal artificial cerebrospinal fluid.
After 3 weeks, the researchers again used electric shocks and flashes to stimulate the old mice, and found that 40% of the old mice who received young cerebrospinal fluid froze in the face of this scenario, compared with only 18% of the mice who received artificial cerebrospinal fluid.
Subsequently, in order to prove the feasibility and authenticity of the experiment, the researchers repeated the experiment several times with other stimuli, thereby proving that young cerebrospinal fluid does have the ability to restore the aging brain.
After that, in order to clarify the mechanism of the above experimental results, the researchers isolated a protein factor called SRF from young cerebrospinal fluid, confirming that this factor caused the delay in brain aging. SRF factor is a transcription factor that drives the rearrangement of the actin skeleton, and injected into this factor can activate the transcription of OPC (a growth factor that keeps nerve function working) in elderly mice, thereby promoting memory improvement.
However, the study was only successfully published last year, and such experiments have not yet been carried out in humans, and it has not been determined whether it has the same mechanism of action for the human brain, so further research is needed. However, we believe that someday in the future, brain aging will really be "cured"!
Write at the end
The brain begins to age much earlier than we think, and after the age of 20, the brain no longer develops and begins to enter the aging period. Therefore, in order to delay brain aging, it is necessary to start prevention in advance. Exercise more, eat more magnesium-containing foods, maintain a good attitude, about 30 minutes of nap time, maintain the most adequate sleep at night, etc., are the most effective ways to delay brain aging, delay brain aging There is no specific drug, only through long-term persistence.
However, there are also relevant studies that have revealed a specific way to delay brain aging - injecting young cerebrospinal fluid, but because this experiment has only been presented in animals, the effect on humans is not yet known, so it needs to wait for further clinical trials to corroborate.
bibliography
[1] Dang Xiaojie, Scientific American: A Day in the Life of the Brain (Part II) English-to-Chinese Practice Report [D]. Shandong University of Science and Technology, 2019
[2] Huang Shouqi, Nourishing the brain and delaying aging: scientific research on brain health should be paid attention to [J]. Xiamen Science and Technology, 2019(01)