Dementia Prevention

Using Your Head to Save Your Brain

By: Emily Clionsky, Mitchell Clionsky

Narrated by: Nan McNamara

Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Worried about memory loss and dementia risk? This new book will show you easy-to-follow steps to keep your brain healthy.

Emily Clionsky, MD, and Mitchell Clionsky, PhD, are a physician and neuropsychologist couple who have cared for their own parents with dementia, created a test used by doctors to measure cognitive function, and treated more than 25,000 patients with cognitive impairment. In Dementia Prevention, they combine the most current scientific findings about Alzheimer's disease and other dementias with their experience to present a practical guide that empowers you to improve your brain's future.

This book skips the fads, the unsupported claims of advertised products, and fringe theories. Instead, the authors guide you through a science-based tour of dementia, including how your brain works and how its function is affected by everything from blood circulation and blood pressure to sugar levels, medications, vision, and hearing. You will learn how your activity level, weight, habits, mental outlook, and social engagement may affect your likelihood of developing dementia.

Dementia Prevention provides a dementia risk checklist to better understand your personal risk profile to help you on your journey. The authors' training and experience as behavioral scientists will help you set better goals, identify roadblocks to success, and overcome these obstacles. Forgetfulness and confusion are not an inevitable part of growing older—you can make changes to keep your brain working well into your 70s and beyond. From how you breathe while you sleep to what you do socially and physically every day, Dementia Prevention will give you practical—and sometimes surprising—methods for you to protect your brain.

©2023 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2023 Recorded Books

Essential Information about Dementia

This title is one of the best books I have listened to about signs of dementia and how to treat it. Written by a MD and PHD husband/wife team, it is science based. Everything they share is based on studies, which they cite. One thing I particularly liked was links to tools. For example, they include a tool that can help the reader determine if they are taking medication with acetylcholine inhibitors in them, for instance. Apparently, acetylcholine inhibitors can damage the brain! Who knew?

Also included are great motivational talks that I imagine they use with their patients when they see them. I finished the book feeling hopeful about the current state of Alzheimer’s and armed with tools and information that can help me keep my brain healthy for the future.