The brain can be treated like a muscle that can atrophy in this regard. “Use it or lose it” is right, especially as you age.
I’ve worked in factories before. I’m not saying you have to be smart to work in a factory, but if you spend too much time in one you won’t be.
I think there’s a balance point. I’ve heard stress and anxiety can do this as well in a highly unpredictable workplace.
You need changing activities and changing usage of your brain.
This seems like sloppy reporting, but I am a sloppy commenter who hasn’t dug into the study. There seems to be a big leap from correlation to causation.
Here’s one reason to take pause:
Years spent in school did help counter the impact of a repetitive job, but not entirely, Edwin said. Attending college, for example, reduced the impact of a repetitive job by about 60% but didn’t fully negate the risk.
Years spent in school would also potentially correlate with many other lifestyle differences that could be more important to cognition than repetitive jobs. The CNN article ends with this:
Adopting a brain healthy lifestyle, such as eating a Mediterranean-style diet, limiting alcohol and stopping smoking, staying on top of vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, regularly evaluating and treating hearing and vision loss, all while “getting adequate sleep and managing stress can help people slam the breaks on cognitive decline,” he [Isaacson] said.
Well, did they look to see if people who work repetitive jobs are less likely to smoke while more likely to eat better and get more sleep? They very well could have stratified this way. It would be nice if the article indicated obvious confounders and how they are controlled for. Do people who spent more time in school but work repetitive jobs also do these other things but to a lesser degree? Seems important to note.
Adopting a brain healthy lifestyle, such as eating a Mediterranean-style diet, limiting alcohol and stopping smoking, staying on top of vascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, regularly evaluating and treating hearing and vision loss, all while “getting adequate sleep and managing stress can help people slam the breaks on cognitive decline,” he [Isaacson] said.
Literally all of that described my father. He was even a university professor, so he had a lot of schooling.
He also died of frontal lobe dementia. (My wild hypothesis is it was because of what he was inhaling as a child, growing up in London during the Blitz.)
There’s just no guarantees.
Pretty amazing your father checked all those boxes, and then still developed dementia… My condolences… Just an absolutely horrible disease. Out of curiosity did you ever learn your father’s apoe3 based risk “adjustment” for lack of the correct term? (No pressure to share and certainly no pressure to reveal what that testing came up with) The fact that your father took such good care of himself, exercised his brain, and still developed dementia makes me think there truly must be strong genetic predisposition(s) for it as well. But it’s also scary to think of how many unaccounted-for deaths might actually be ultimately attributable to things like the Blitz and wwii.
Side question- Do/did you ever come to feel confident you could truly narrow it down to one most likely culprit for causing the dementia? I myself lost a parent to alz, and have come to lay the blame on a handful of different possibilities (although truth be told they could all be sort of summarized by something like late stage capitalism or capitalist alienation, or something. I wonder how relatable it is to waffle around endlessly between thoughts that “this is what probably most contributed to it… no this… (months/years later) no this”
It’s rough not being able to point to what truly, certainly went wrong and caused such suffering.
No, we never knew what the cause of the dementia was. It’s all a guess. It also went from so slow we didn’t realize it until after it was too late and he attacked a cop to going immediately downhill from there and dying within 18 months. It was definitely an unusual case. Sorry to hear about the loss of your parent.
These kinds of well-needed comments full of doubts and questions of what all was controlled for in the research and whether confounding variables remained, the kinds that always come up on reddit and now (hooray!!) lemmy, make me wonder whether research could in some cases be dramatically improved by letting the internet loose on the research hypothesis ahead of time instead of once the paper is published.
Scientists: “In our study, we will evaluate whether a is correlated with an increase in b. We will control for w, y, x, and z.
The internet/reddit/lemmy: “You absolute imbeciles. Did it not occur to you to control for α, β, and gamma through omega?!
Scientists: well, we will certainly consider all those and do our best to do so now!
Like everything on the internet, that feedback would quickly devolve into political bickering.
There’s a lot of low quality science that gets done out there. Scientists are pretty good at spotting it, but they can’t do much to stop it. The real problem is science reporting misleading the public about what the current state of the science is.
I hate how the human body clearly atrophies with disuse. I’m working hard now and saving for retirement, early retirement, but if I achieve my goal of a slow relaxed retirement with no stress… I’m more likely to experience cognitive decline and die early.
But if I shouldn’t be trying to retire early, should I be working until I die? That kind of sucks too.
You know there are ways to engage and develop your brain other than employment, right?
