By the time you walk from one room to the next, you’ve forgotten what you intended to do once you got there. You meet someone new and have lost track of his/her name before the first conversation is over. You sit down to your computer, get sucked into your incoming emails, and then can’t remember whom you intended to write to in the first place. Sound familiar?

These experiences might leave you worried that you are on the scary slide to dementia. While it’s true that memory and brain functioning are generally strongest in our 30s and then begin to falter, there is much that you can do to prevent decline and regain cognitive functioning. Also, epigenetics (the study of the interaction between genetics and lifestyle/environment) has shown that even those with genetic vulnerability for dementia can prevent those genes from being activated by making healthy lifestyle choices. Continue reading →