Transcription
How many of you would like to live to be a hundred or more? How about living well and healthy to a hundred or beyond? I'm going to show you how to do it. Meet Madame Jean. Come on. She lived in the South of France, where she ate the Mediterranean diet, was physically and mentally active, born 1875, died 1997. So how long did she live? Can anybody do the math? 122. You passed your first cognitive test—well done.
Now, life expectancy was much lower in the 19th century, so her longevity was quite remarkable. Before she died, she was mentally sharp and had the brain of a healthy 80-year-old. She was also an astute businesswoman. At the age of 94, she sold her apartment to a French businessman who agreed to pay her rent and let her live there for the rest of her life. He died 10 years later.
Now, you may have heard about the blue zones—areas of the world where there are clusters of centenarians, people who live to a hundred or more—places like Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; or Loma Linda, California. Now, in these regions, people share lifestyle habits that comprise what I call the formula for successful aging: four things we can all do for ourselves—physical activity, mental exercise, stress management, and healthy diet.
Now, I can't guarantee that if you decide to move to Sardinia, Italy, that you'll live to be a hundred, but there is compelling scientific evidence that daily lifestyle habits have a much greater impact on your healthy aging than your genes. The quality longevity that we want to achieve first involves brain health. So let me try to define brain health, because many people assume that brain health is just memory. It's all about memory—certainly memory is important. It defines who we are. Without our memory, we have no past, we can't plan for the future, and we can't enjoy the present. But brain health involves several mental functions, like being able to think and reason, or keep a steady mood.
Now, if we have a healthy brain, then we can make the right decisions about lifestyle strategy, so we can maintain that brain health. And what's happening in our brains as we age is that they experience excess inflammation—cells that normally fight off infection or repair tissue start attacking healthy brain cells—and we need anti-inflammatory strategies to reverse that process. And many healthy daily habits, like getting a good night's sleep, eating fish, or physical exercise, fight brain aging because they are anti-inflammatory.
Now we know that, as doctors, we can't diagnose Alzheimer's disease—at least in the past we couldn't do that unless there was an autopsy. However, at UCLA, we invented the first brain scan technology that allows us to detect the physical evidence of Alzheimer's disease in living people for the first time. So this animation displays 20 brain scans arranged according to memory scores, and as memory worsens, Alzheimer's, represented by the warmer colors, accumulates in the brain. Now, these scans here show you these yellow and red areas where there's advanced Alzheimer's disease. As the animation starts again, we're seeing the scans of people with normal memory. These people won't develop Alzheimer's symptoms for decades. To think that Alzheimer's disease is silently growing in our brains will freak people out, but I think this technology is an opportunity to detect subtle problems, so we can fight brain aging while it's early in its course. We can plot memory versus time, and we can see that the brain goes downhill if we do nothing to protect it. If we can intervene early, then we can slow down the process. Unfortunately, today we do too little too late, but it's easier to protect a healthy brain than to try to repair damage once it becomes extensive.
Doctors have come up with three major stages of brain aging. Normal aging is when we joke about misplacing our keys or forgetting someone's name; it tends to be stable. But if it progresses, then the person develops mild cognitive impairment, when it takes more time to compensate for memory challenges. Now, if that compensation breaks down, then the individual develops dementia—a memory decline that interferes with independence. There are a lot of different causes of dementia. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause, but depression, medication side effects, or many reversible conditions can cause dementia. So it's important, if you're concerned about your memory, to see your doctor. Even if it is Alzheimer's dementia, there are effective treatments available. We know that if we put an Alzheimer's patient on a placebo pill, they'll continue to worsen, but there are several effective medicines that can temporarily stabilize symptoms. But today there's exciting research trying to detect a disease-modifying treatment that can actually slow down the progression of the illness. These developing treatments include vaccines, infusions, new pills, focused ultrasound to try to jumpstart the brain's memory centers, and even insulin nasal spray, because we know that diabetes increases the risk for Alzheimer's disease. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a magic bullet, but already we know there are several effective strategies to help us age well.
And number one is physical activity. You don't have to become a triathlete to protect your brain; just twenty minutes of brisk daily walking will lower your risk for Alzheimer's disease. Workouts will boost endorphins, which stabilizes your mood, and physical activity actually produces proteins that get your brain cells to sprout new branches, so they communicate more effectively. If you exercise, your brain will get bigger, and a bigger brain is a better brain. So if somebody calls you a Fathead, it's actually a compliment.
Number two: mental exercise. We know that we can stimulate our minds by playing games, by socializing, by doing all kinds of things that are new and interesting. In fact, if you have a college education, you have a lower risk for Alzheimer's disease. We've done some interesting research to find out about our new technology. I mean, the question is, does it help or hinder our brain health? The answer is both. When our devices distract us, we have an impairment in our memory, but we can pick and choose what we commit to memory and look everything else up online. So we decided to do some interesting research to understand this better, to find out what goes on in the brain the first time people search online. Now, to perform this study, we had to find volunteers who had never done an internet search, and we soon learned that we could not recruit these people online—it's not going to work. But we were able to find a group of older adults who were naive to internet searching, and we compared them to an older group that had prior internet experience, and we tracked their online brain activity using MRI scans. So when the Internet-naive people searched online, these red areas show you where their brains were active, but when the Internet-savvy people searched online, their brains were having a party; there was a huge increase in neural activity. So we think when people search online for the first time, or engage in any new mental activity, we don't quite know what to do, but once we come up with a mental strategy, there's an upsurge in neural activity. So simply searching online can be a form of brain exercise.
Now we can also train our brains using memory methods to compensate for everyday memory impairment. I came up with a method I call Look, Snap, Connect. So Look is a reminder to focus attention—the biggest reason we don't remember is we're simply distracted. Snap is a reminder to make a mental snapshot of what you want to recall; our brains are hard-wired to remember visually. And Connect as a way of linking up those mental snapshots, so they have meaning. If something is meaningful, it will be memorable. Now you can use these methods for remembering where you park your car. So here's three bumblebees hovering over my car. Now, if I park just below it in lot 2B, I see William Shakespeare standing on my car reciting "To be or not to be." Now, does that mean that my car is not to be? Lot 2B may not be the best example, but these methods are very powerful for remembering names and faces. So if you meet this gentleman—there's a lot of hair—it's very easy, because his name is Harry. Lisa has a subtle Mona Lisa smile, or you meet Mrs. Bangle—her bangs make it easy for a last name—and she tells you she's an attorney, and that helps you remember her personality.
Now, I encourage people to use these methods, because when you meet someone who is, you know, and you can't recall their name, it's very stressful. And that brings us to number three: stress management. Stress is the enemy of healthy aging. Chronic stress shrinks the memory centers of the brain. If you inject a human volunteer with the stress hormone cortisol, it causes temporary memory impairment, but Tai Chi, meditation, yoga, and other relaxation methods can reverse the process, can improve mood, and improve memory. Ten minutes of meditation each day actually rewires areas of the brain and can improve measures of telomeres on our chromosomes, which predicts longer life expectancy. We can also reduce stress by spending time with friends, by getting a good night's sleep, and you can combine these strategies efficiently by practicing the triple threat against Alzheimer's disease: take a walk with a friend. The physical exercise will boost your brain health; the conversation will tweak those neural circuits; if you talk about what's worrying you, it will reduce stress. Now it's important to be relaxed, because when we don't have stress, we digest our food better. And that brings us to number four: healthy diet. Obesity increases the risk for dementia, but when obese people lose weight, it improves their memory—and those effects last for years. We need more omega-3 fats from fish and nuts, which are anti-inflammatory; consuming fruits and vegetables fights age-related oxidative stress; and we've got to minimize those chips and donuts and other, other refined sugars and processed foods, which increase the risk for diabetes, and that increases your risk for dementia.
Good news on the nutrition front: alcohol in moderation lowers your risk for dementia. Now, it may be that just having a glass of wine at dinner lowers stress, but it could be ingredients in the alcohol—resveratrol—which has been extracted from red wine, can actually be anti-aging in the laboratory. The trouble is, we don't know if the extract actually gets into the brain. So anybody here taking resveratrol capsules, wash it down with a nice Bordeaux to be on the safe side. Caffeine in moderation protects the brain, as do spices. We just completed a study testing a bioavailable form of curcumin from the spice from turmeric; it's anti-inflammatory. In India, there's a lower rate of Alzheimer's disease, and people who consume spicy Indian food more often perform better on memory tests. Let's see how your memory is now. What's his name? Excellent. And Lisa? And you remember this woman? Very good—Sue Bangle.
I incur the bottom line is, it's never too late or too early to start living a healthy longevity lifestyle. We've already started by making the connection between behavior and healthy aging. The next step is to begin a program that is fun and easy. My most recent book is called *Two Weeks to a Younger Brain*. Trust me, if I called it *Two Years to a Younger Brain*, no one would buy it, but two weeks is just enough time to start learning the exercises, to start experiencing benefits, and that positive feedback motivates us to continue the healthy lifestyle strategies for the long haul. This is what we're doing at the UCLA Longevity Center. You can look us up online and get some brain exercise, or check out other resources like AARP Staying Sharp, which is a brain health platform that is science-based and helps people track their brain health over time. Remember, your everyday habits have a greater impact on how long and how well you age. Madame C'mon lived 122 years with a healthy brain, and you too can take control of your future longevity by following the formula for successful aging: exercise your body, stimulate your mind, manage stress, and eat right, so you can enjoy yourself as you live better and longer. Thank you. [Applause]