ABBA, a group of outgoing Swedes who probably aren't at risk for early dementia.
Here's yet another reason to envy (or emulate) those outgoing, happy-go-lucky types:
They might have a lesser chance of developing dementia. That's the word from a new study published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers survery 506 older adults in Sweden and asked them about their degrees of sociability and extroversion and anxiety levels, then followed up to see if they developed dementia.
The results:
People who were not socially active but calm and relaxed had a 50 percent lower risk of developing dementia compared with people who were isolated and prone to distress. But the dementia risk was also 50 percent lower for people who were outgoing and calm compared to those who were outgoing and prone to distress.
"In the past, studies have shown that chronic distress can affect parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, possibly leading to dementia, but our findings suggest that having a calm and outgoing personality in combination with a socially active lifestyle may decrease the risk of developing dementia even further," study author Hui-Xin Wang, PhD, with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, said in a press release. "The good news is, lifestyle factors can be modified as opposed to genetic factors which cannot be controlled. But these are early results, so how exactly mental attitude influences risk for dementia is not clear."
Estimates are that one in seven Americans aged 71 and older has some form of dementia. The number of Americans nearing that age is expected to double by the year 2030. .
