Alzheimer’s disease prevention starts today. It is never too early. There are identifiable risk factors that can be modified to reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease This book is an all-encompassing tool for the entire family – guiding readers through facts of the disease, and giving real tips for prevention as well as supportive information on diagnosis and treatment.

In our lifetime, Alzheimer’s will come to be seen not as a terminal disease... but a chronic one... Looking at the future of Alzheimer’s in this way... allows us to prepare our health-care infrastructure, health insurance paradigm, and caretaking system. Only then will we be ready for the large influx of chronic Alzheimer’s patients who will live with and in relation to the disease, rather than in fear of it.

Along with my fellow dementia doctors, I have undertaken a global challenge, one that will affect all future generations and one that requires us to shift away from the way we providers and consumers of health care think about cures vs. prevention, terminal vs. chronic disease, and the economics of health and health care.

From every angle, the work of delaying Alzheimer’s symptoms through lifestyle, diet, environment, and health maintenance... remains the most financially and medically sound avenue for now. Doing so will buy us time to fill in the gaps in what we know about Alzheimer’s pathology... It will allow us time to improve available and new treatment methods.

A modification of lifestyle, namely the frequency with which people engage in cognitively stimulating activities, may lower the risk of cognitive impairment in old age. The net sum of the information gathered is that sustained, fully engaged mental activity makes the brain more resistant to later decline. It may turn out to be one of the strongest protections against brain aging.