By Leah Fein
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a set of guidelines to reduce the risk of dementia globally, essentially advising to take care of your heart to take care of your brain.
Dementia is a loss of cognitive functioning — thinking, memory, reasoning, and behavioral abilities — to the extent that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities. Dementia has many causes and no cure, which is why the WHO emphasized the need for adopting healthy behaviors.
“The scientific evidence gathered for these guidelines confirm what we have suspected for some time, that what is good for our heart, is also good for our brain,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.