By the time we reach midlife, we all have some of the brain disease(s) that causes dementia, but only some of us will go on to experience the symptoms of cognitive decline later in life. Why is that? The truth is dementia doesn’t suddenly appear. In fact, the seeds for dementia are sown inside your brain years, even decades before you will ever experience any symptoms. Today, I breakdown your risk of mental decline in midlife and what it tells you about your chances of going on to...

From hot flushes to low mood to insomnia to forgetfulness, many of the foreign feelings that women experiences during menopause are caused by changes happening inside the brain. Today, I breakdown the different brain symptoms of menopause, why they put women at higher risk of dementia, and what can be done to do mitigate this risk. 

Exercise causes physical changes to your brain that invigorate thinking, reasoning, memory and mood.  Your brain receives positive benefits every time you put on your trainers and move away from the sofa. In this episode, I breakdown how exercise keeps the brain young and what exercises women should be doing before and after menopause to enhance their well-being and safeguard against future dementia.

Is the memory loss and mental decline of dementia an inevitable part of getting older Let’s look at what healthy ageing looks like and compare it to the mental decline and memory loss caused by dementia.

Many of us get more forgetful as we get older. Most people need a bit longer to remember things, get distracted more easily or struggle to do some tasks as well as they used to. This may become more noticeable when we reach middle age, during our 40s, 50 and 60s.  These changes...

People are being diagnosed younger and younger with Alzheimer’s disease. Even if you don’t show any Alzheimer’s symptoms, the silent brain signs can already be in place as early as your thirties or forties. Currently, we don’t have a meaningful treatment for a disease that affects someone worldwide every three seconds. So what can we do to deal with this Alzheimer’s epidemic? Today, I talk to certified nutrition specialist, Amy Berger, about how fuelling the...

The way you live your life can actually change your genetic makeup. Rather than having a set genetic blueprint, our genes can switched on or off at different stages of our life. The field of epigenetics is showing that although our genes themselves are fixed, genetic expression is not. It is malleable and and heavily influenced by our environment and lifestyle choices we make.

It is this expression, the switching off and on of genes, that gets ‘read’ by cells in the body. This...

Your brain starts to shrink as early as your 30s. Even if you seem perfectly healthy, you may be losing as much as 0.4% of your brain or about several million brain cells every year. The rate at which your brain gets smaller increases with age and is a major factor in early mental decline.

Brain shrinkage doesn’t happen to all areas of the brain at once. Some areas shrink more and faster than others, and brain shrinkage is likely to get more severe as you get older.

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We’ve long known that swimming is an excellent cardiovascular exercise that strengthens your heart and circulatory system. But it also really benefits your brain and mental health. It helps the brain to release mood-boosting brain chemicals. repair damage to brain cells and grow brain cells.

Your brain is where your thoughts and emotions live, and a healthy brain contributes greatly to good mental health. Swimming can help lower anxiety and depression. It provides extra benefits for...

Why are women twice as likely as men to develop Alzheimer’s disease? I discuss some important differences in the way women's brains age and how this increases their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not that a female brain is fundamentally different to a male brain. But there are some really important differences in the way a female brain responds to hormonal changes at different stages of life that drives brain ageing in women, significantly increasing their...