from journal Neurology
Cardiovascular risk factors, especially high blood pressure and diabetes become more common in midlife. University of California San Francisco researchers say those two risk factors, plus smoking, increase the risk of accelerated declines in thinking skills in middle age. Their study, in the journal Neurology, involved more than two thousand people with an average age of fifty for five years. None had dementia when the study started. The greatest decline in cognitive skills came in the participants who smoked. They were sixty-five percent more likely to experience accelerated cognitive decline. Surprising to researchers, those who were considered obese and those with high cholesterol did not show signs of accelerated cognitive decline.