What if You Knew You'd Develop Dementia?

Is it too late to change the course of your brain?

Earlier this month I stumbled across Dr. Jen Gunter and a stack called The Vajenda because of this essay:

Steps to Reduce Your Risk of Dementia

Dementia is on my mind all the time—that’s not a pun of any kind. I’ve been caring for my Ma at some level my whole life. It was the usual co-dependent/enmeshed, Beales of Grey Gardens, mother/daughter relationship and fucked-up childhood (mine) that one finds in a bad marriage (hers, you know, and my dad’s), but never more so than the last twelve years when she began the decline into dementia. I picture our relationship as something between a Celtic knot and a Rat King. Impossible to see where one of us ends and the other starts we’re like emotionally conjoined twins, surgical separation would mean death for one or both.

Dramatic, huh? That’s what you’re thinking. Well, she’s the whole reason I still live in New York. So, naturally, when she started sliding into an illness that erases who you are little by little, I began to worry about myself.

Gunter listed things¹ you can control to help prevent dementia.

I’d initiated some of these steps already, but I worry about the damage done by the first half of my life. I didn’t start taking care of myself until about twenty years ago. The first 45+ years were a shit show of abuse, apathy, neglect and generally not giving a shit about anything. I trashed my brain and my body, and was willing to take whatever the consequences of my actions were. Kind of a nihilist chic, if you would.

I didn’t know anything about unintended consequences. My life was only focused on instant gratification; the result being having to deal with delayed unexpected consequences. By that I mean the shit you didn’t see coming that happens because of something you’ve done when you thought you knew everything.

Getting clean and sober wasn’t enough to stave off peripheral neuropathy, thirty years after the fact. That means I don’t feel my feet so much. Most of the time I can’t tell if I’m barefoot or wearing socks. And so, sober I fall down a lot more than I ever did when I was drunk. That’s a good example of unintended consequences.

I worry, will all I’m doing now be enough to stave off the dementia?

Me, 20 years from now, with dementia, but still with good hair.

Where I see how we stack up against Dr. Jen Gunter’s List of Modifiable Midlife Risk Factors for Dementia.²