When I ask people how long they want to live, most say something like “as long as I’m healthy.” Most of us naturally want to be of sound mind and body until the end. Fortunately, science has found several best practices that can help give us the best chance of living longer and staying physically and mentally well — behaviors with benefits that accrue whether you embrace them when you’re young or old.

A new study puts some compelling numbers to the mental side of the equation, showing that a few key lifestyle factors are linked not only to longer life but also more years without Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.

The research, using data from 2,449 people 65 and older in the United States who had no history of dementia when they joined the study, asked whether participants do these five things or not:

• Get 150 minutes (2.5 hours) or more of physical activity per week, whether formal exercise or simply walking or doing yard work
• Eat a diet rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables and berries and low in fast/fried food, and red meats
• Stimulate the mind with activities like reading, visiting museums, or doing crosswords or puzzles
• Keep alcohol consumption at low to moderate levels or less
• Avoid smoking

People got 1 point for engaging in each of these health-positive activities. Those who scored 4 or 5 were deemed to have the healthiest lifestyles, and those who scored 1 or 2 were considered to have the least healthy lifestyles. Follow-up tests for dementia and other conditions were performed for 18 years.

Hours gained

The findings are two-fold:

• Years of remaining life expectancy among the healthiest-lifestyle group, starting at age 65, were 24.2 years for women and 23.1 years for men, compared with 21.1 and 17.4 years for the least healthy women and men.
• The least healthy people could expect to spend a significant amount of their remaining time dealing with Alzheimer’s disease — 4.1 years for women and 2.1 for men. The most healthy women and men would not only have more years of life expectancy but would spend less of it dealing with Alzheimer’s disease — 2.6 years for women and 1.4 for men.

“A healthy lifestyle was associated with a longer life expectancy among men and women, and they lived a larger proportion of their remaining years without Alzheimer’s dementia,” the researchers conclude in their study paper.

Indeed, on a percentage basis, those with the healthiest lifestyles spent notably less of their remaining years suffering Alzheimer’s compared to the least-healthy group:

• Women: 10.8% vs. 19.3%
• Men: 6.1% vs. 12.0%

The findings are detailed today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ)

Habits worth adopting at any age

The study cannot prove cause-and-effect. Among its limitations: Self-reporting of lifestyle habits is not always accurate. Also, the questionnaires did not determine whether study participants had adopted the lifestyle factors recently or if they’d adhered to them for years, says study leader Klodian Dhana, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at Rush Medical College in Chicago. It’s therefore not possible to conclude, from this study, whether a person gains more benefit by choosing healthy behaviors as a young adult or in middle age, versus waiting until later in life, Dhana tells me.

But the findings add to other evidence that dementia is not inevitable, and for many people, there are proactive ways to delay or prevent its onset. And the sooner one adopts healthy strategies, the better: Poor health in middle age more than doubles a person’s chances of getting dementia later on.

No surprise, the best strategies for improving brain health, according to much research, mirror the behaviors highlighted by Dhana and his colleague:

The new research matters not just to you and me, but to society more broadly, writes HwaJung Choi, PhD, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, in an accompanying editorial in the journal.

“These findings have important implications for the wellbeing of aging populations and for related public health policies and programs,” says Choi, who was not involved in the research. “Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias are among the most expensive health conditions both economically and socially, having a profound impact on those with dementia, their families, and wider society.”

Knowing the statistics is one thing. Acting on them is a whole other challenge, of course, and so I suggest reading this as a next step:

You’ll learn helpful strategies for creating new habits, including how to make specific goals and frame them positively with an eye toward small but real changes — changes that just might save your life.

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