Risk Of Alzheimer's, Dementia Can Be Reduced By Lifestyle Changes, Report Says

There are no proven ways to prevent Alzheimer’s around the world, however a new report presented Wednesday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London, claimed that if you can avoid nine risks mentioned in the report starting from your childhood, it might just delay or even have the potential to prevent about a third of dementia cases.

The risks are related to lifestyle factors that need to be modified or changed in order to prevent the disease. The factors include the ones that can make your brain more vulnerable to memory problems.

Read: Dementia In Old Age Can Be Prevented By Cognitive Training, Report Says

The report was compiled first by the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention and Care and published online Thursday. The commission includes 24 experts from around the world who review numerous studies and analyze them to produce a model that would explain how lifestyle changes could reduce the risk of dementia and might also prevent it.

Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia prevalent around the world. It leads to loss of thinking, remembering, and reasoning. According to the National Institute on Aging, the disease is currently ranked sixth leading cause of death in the United States. However, the institute's recent estimates show the disease may rank third as a cause of death among elderly people — only behind heart disease and cancer.

Dementia has affected around 47 million people around the world and it has been estimated that the number could increase three times by 2050. In 2015, the global cost of dementia had been estimated to be $818 billion. The cost is also estimated to rise equally beside the increasing number of cases of dementia, according to the Washington Post.

The recent Lancet report, which was discussed at the conference in London, has identified nine risk factors during a person’s overall lifespan which if avoided can lower the risk of the disease. Some include social isolation, hypertension, hearing loss and obesity in middle age, depression, physical inactivity, and smoking.

Read: Living With Alzheimer's: 5 Ways To Help Patients With Dementia Enjoy Life

"The message is that conditions like dementia are not immutable and are substantially modifiable by the environment," Lon Schneider, professor of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and a co-author of the Lancet report, told the Washington Post.

He also noted that changing all these factors mentioned in the report could reduce the risk by 35 percent. Schneider said a 35 percent risk reduction is "far larger than anything you can ever expect for drugs." He also added that lifestyle modification is cheaper than consumption of drugs to treat the disease. "Dementia is not a condition that’s ever going to be such that a single drug can be considered a cure for the illness.”

Deaths caused by the disease increased by 55 percent in just 15 years in the U.S., according to a report compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March. In 2014, there were 93,541 deaths from Alzheimer's in the country as compared to 44,536 in 1999.

"Millions of Americans and their family members are profoundly affected by Alzheimer’s disease," CDC acting director Anne Schuchat told NBC News in May. "As the number of older Americans with Alzheimer’s disease rises, more family members are taking on the emotionally and physically challenging role of care giver than ever before. These families need and deserve our support," Schuchat added.