Live long enough and you too can get a rotted dilapidated brain.

Boston, MA—Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have estimated that one in six women are at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in their lifetime, while the risk for men is one in ten. These findings were released today by the Alzheimer’s Association in their publication 2008 Alzheimer’s Disease: Facts and Figures.

The higher incidence of Alzheimer's among women comes as a result of women living longer. Basically, the longer you live the higher the odds you'll get Alzheimer's (and other degenerative diseases of the brain) and die from it.

Stroke and dementia are the most widely feared age-related neurological diseases, and are also the only neurological disorders listed in the ten leading causes of disease burden.

The researchers followed 2,794 participants of the Framingham Heart Study for 29 years who were without dementia. They found 400 cases of dementia of all types and 292 cases of AD. They estimated the lifetime risk of any dementia at more than one in five for women, and one in seven for men.

Our brains are aging. This is bad. When we get into our 70s and 80s our brains will really start to malfunction. Did I mention this is bad? Can you still remember two sentences later that I mentioned this is bad? Isn't it really handy that you can remember a sentence long enough to see logical connections between sentences? Don't you want to continue to be able to do this? This is an argument for a very aggressive program to develop brain rejuvenation therapies using stem cells and gene therapies. Yes, we should develop rejuvenation therapies as an urgent priority. In the mean time fish oils DHA and EPA appear to slow down brain aging and reduce the risk of Alzheimer's. So lets slow down our brain aging while we try to develop the means to reverse brain aging.

Brain aging is very expensive.

• As many as 5.2 million people in the United States are living with Alzheimer’s.

• 10 million baby boomers will develop Alzheimer's in their lifetime.

• Every 71 seconds, someone develops Alzheimer’s.

• Alzheimer's is the seventh-leading cause of death.

• The direct and indirect costs of Alzheimer's and other dementias to Medicare, Medicaid and businesses amount to more than $148 billion each year.

Those costs do not include the costs of lower earnings since we can't think as productively as our minds become messed up and less able to function.

Millions of people have cognitive impairment short of dementia.

A new study of 856 people age 71 years and older found that 22 percent had some cognitive impairment that did not reach the threshold for dementia (Article, p. 427). Each year, about 8 percent of individuals with cognitive impairment but not dementia at baseline died and about 12 percent progressed to dementia. Using the 22 percent figure, researchers calculate that in 2002 in the United States, 5.4 million people aged 71 and older had cognitive impairment without dementia. Previous estimates of cognitive impairment without dementia ranged from 5 percent to 29 percent.

Bear in mind (at least while you can) that some old folks have Alzheimer's, others have dementia, still others have cognitive impairment that falls short of getting classified as dementia, and still others have impairment due to stroke or Parkinson's Disease.

But on the bright side the incidence of cognitive impairment among the elderly appears to be declining.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Although it’s too soon to sound the death knell for the “senior moment,” it appears that memory loss and thinking problems are becoming less common among older Americans.

A new nationally representative study shows a downward trend in the rate of “cognitive impairment” — the umbrella term for everything from significant memory loss to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease — among people aged 70 and older.

The prevalence of cognitive impairment in this age group went down by 3.5 percentage points between 1993 and 2002 — from 12.2 percent to 8.7 percent, representing a difference of hundreds of thousands of people.

Lower rates of smoking probably contributed to this improvement. Cholesterol lowering drugs and better diets might have helped too. Ditto for lower levels of air pollution.