Cristine Aiken:
I know that every day is a gamble. I know that every time I feel a lightning bolt, okay, am I going to recover this time? How much more have I lost in my abilities? It’s like I live in the moment now.
Jay Ingram:
Our guest, Christine Aiken, had a stroke and now lives with vascular dementia. She’s on a mission to change how we think about that disease even as she faces the threat of ongoing smaller strokes.
Allison Sekuler:
Welcome to Defy Dementia, the podcast for anyone who has a brain.
Jay Ingram:
Defy dementia is about many things like healthy aging, boosting brain health, and demystifying dementia.
Allison Sekuler:
Today we’re investigating the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia. It’s all about blood flow to the brain.
Jay Ingram:
I’m Jay Ingram. I’m a science journalist. I’ve been writing and speaking about the brain for much of my career.
Allison Sekuler:
I’m Allison Sekuler. I’m President and Chief Scientist at the Baycrest Academy for Research and Education and at the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation.
Jay Ingram:
Join us as we defy dementia because you’re never too young or too old to take care of your brain.
Allison Sekuler:
As we mentioned in our Dementia 101 episode, every now and then we will be dedicating an episode to a specific type of dementia to build awareness about that condition and hear from people who are living with it.
Jay Ingram:
Today, vascular dementia. Vascular dementia is caused by cerebrovascular disease when the blood vessels that supply the brain are damaged. For instance, after strokes, large or small, reducing blood flow deprives brain cells of oxygen and nutrients eventually killing them.
Allison Sekuler:
And depending on where in the brain this damage occurs, it can affect movement, vision, speech, memory, and other cognitive functions.
Jay Ingram:
Later in the show, we’re going to talk to a leading expert on how to lower the risk of vascular dementia, but first a firsthand story about living well after such a diagnosis.
Allison Sekuler:
Our first guest, Christine Aiken, lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia. She’s 67 years old and for nearly two decades, she worked in British Columbia’s healthcare system caring for people living with dementia. At the age of 54, while moving a patient with a lifting device, she suffered a stroke and she temporarily lost the ability to speak and walk normally, but she gradually regained those abilities. Then two years later at 56, she was diagnosed with vascular dementia and cerebrovascular disease, but that did not slow her down. She became a dementia advocate and a public speaker raising awareness in small communities across Canada. And she’s also spoken at major dementia conferences all over the world. Christine Aiken joins us today from Chilliwack, BC. Christine, thank you for helping us to defy dementia.
Cristine Aiken:
Thank you for having me.
Allison Sekuler:
We would like to hear about your stroke, but first let’s hear about your advocacy work. Can you tell us about the last event that you spoke at?
Cristine Aiken:
The last event was in a small rural community, Grand Forks, British Columbia. And it was attended by about 125, 130 people from within the community in the business community. So it was well attended.
Allison Sekuler:
What were you speaking about? What was the main thing you wanted the audience to understand?
Cristine Aiken:
Not to fear getting a diagnosis for dementia and that you can still have a great life and you can ensure a better quality of life if you can get past the fear.
Jay Ingram:
Allison mentioned in the introduction that you’d had a stroke while moving a patient. Tell us what happened that day.
Cristine Aiken:
It was a regular workday and I had put the patient in the lift and was going to do what I had to do and all of a sudden I just felt a lightning bolt go through my head. My vision went and I just kind of leaned against the wall. That’s the last thing I remember until I could hear my coworker and friend who had happened to be on shift that day. I could hear her talking to the nurses and doctors and I was in the hospital at that point in a hospital bed, but I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t move any part of my body. I was just staring at the ceiling. So she was my voice at that time. Yeah, it was terrifying.
Jay Ingram:
I bet. And that was the immediate effect, but tell us about your recovery.
Cristine Aiken:
My recovery took a long time. I couldn’t walk properly. My vision would go. My balance and coordination was off, so it was baby steps. I had lots of rehabilitation and just not knowing though was it all going to come back. My speech came back fairly quickly, although not the same as it was before. It was a lot of hard work.
Allison Sekuler:
Yeah. And then after your large stroke, the big one, what led you to seek out further diagnosis of dementia?
Cristine Aiken:
Because things still didn’t feel right to me. I said, “I shouldn’t be having so many struggles with some of the tasks I would normally do at home,” like cooking. Why can’t I follow a recipe anymore? So that pushed me to want answers. That actually took, and I can’t remember exactly, that might be the dementia thing kicking in, somewhere between a year to two years after the initial big event. The doctor that normally deals with the dementia patients who I knew very well from my work would not take me on as a patient. He told my doctor flat out, “No, I don’t want young dementia patients.” So I was left with nobody except my GP, but he put together a team of doctors that would work with me. I had an internist. I had a vascular specialist. I had a neuropsych doctor who really knew a lot about the brain and then MRIs and all kinds of testing and different things. I finally got my diagnosis.
Allison Sekuler:
So your doctors thought that you might’ve had cerebrovascular disease even before the big stroke?
Cristine Aiken:
Yes. Yes.
Jay Ingram:
Christine, how are cerebrovascular disease and risk of strokes affecting you now?
Cristine Aiken:
It’s an everyday huge risk for me. My doctor does a lot of work with me to make sure my medications are right because we have to keep my blood flow right. We have to keep helping my heart because my vascular system is a mess and my heart has to work too hard. And so every day I have to think about that and I have to do the things like the exercise. I can’t let that lapse. That’ll cost me my life.
Jay Ingram:
And are you still occasionally having TIAs, transient ischemic attacks, little strokes?
Cristine Aiken:
Oh, yes. I have lots of them. I wake up sometimes in the morning and I know, okay, there’s been an event overnight. My vision is blurry. My coordination and balance is all off. And I go, I have to reconfigure my day because I’m not going to be able to cognitively or physically, because for me it’s both, I am not going to be able to manage the day I had hoped to. I know that every day is a gamble. I know that every time I feel a lightning bolt or I have another TIA, okay, am I going to recover this time? How much more have I lost in my abilities?
So I have just learned to think, okay, when I wake up, I just have to sort of hit the ground running and I do as much as I can depending on how I’m feeling that day in that day. It’s like I live in the moment now and I have a great team of people that’s the other side of it that I am surrounded with and I’m very fortunate to have them. So without that team sort of helping me and the support of my husband who just goes, “You want to rethink this plan today?”
Jay Ingram:
Yeah, but that happens in every marriage.
Cristine Aiken:
And sometimes that’s not easy because sometimes I can be, “Oh, I think I’ll be okay.” And he’ll go, “But clearly you’re not today.” And then I get mad at him for telling me that because I don’t want to hear it. So it’s kind of like we’ve worked around all of that stuff so it’s like, “Okay, we’ll do something.” And it’s having to be very aware of those things and being willing to accept the help and support of other people, but also educate them as to what kind of help and support I need.
Jay Ingram:
How did that diagnosis of vascular dementia lead you to what you’re doing now, Christine?
Cristine Aiken:
I was devastated not only from having the stroke and it’s very scary when a doctor looks at you and says, “Well, this is what you have and you have three to eight years to live. Get your life in order, your affairs in order,” and that’s what they tell you. So I went into that rabbit hole of darkness for a little while and then I thought, “This can’t be all. This can’t be it.” So my motto became, “I’m not done yet.” So I started researching, sitting at home on my computer and then I found some organizations and I started talking to people, other people that were living with dementia and that started me on the journey of advocacy. Too many people are, they don’t get out of that dark rabbit hole. So we have to change it so they know that there’s life after, that rebuilt my life.
The other side of that was I was absolutely devastated at the loss of my career. I loved my career and I got diagnosed the next day I was told, “Your job is gone.” There’s no offer for people with a dementia diagnosis. They just write you off and it’s like, that’s not good enough. And I believe now I’m not angry anymore, I am thankful as odd as that sounds because my life is so much richer. I have heard stories from people that you just can’t even imagine and my life is richer now.
Jay Ingram:
Christine, in our podcast, we are always talking about how you can reduce your risk of dementia. You already have a diagnosis of vascular dementia, but you are also pretty active. So what are you doing to reduce the risk of anything further happening to you?
Cristine Aiken:
My nutrition, eating the right foods is really important. I don’t worry about the rest of my body so much, but I feed my brain because if I feed my brain, my brain will send the right signals everywhere else. That’s how I view it. And I stay involved in a lot of research because knowledge is power. I learn a lot from the doctors and researchers and people out there. I learn so much about ways to help myself.
My exercise, something we talked about at this conference I was just at in Toronto last week was I have discovered and I shared it with the researchers so that they could pull it apart a little further for myself when my brain is fatigued or stressed and I’m struggling with day-to-day getting through things I stop trying to do anything that takes brain power and I do physical work, like hard physical work. Like I tore all the carpets out of my house. I ripped all the baseboards out. My husband comes home and he never knows what’s going on. “What are you doing? I don’t like the carpets. We got to get rid of them.” Okay. He goes, “Okay, I guess they’re gone now.” Because when I’m doing physical work, because I’m still physically strong, when I do physical work, my brain relaxes. It’s not using the same brain power. It’s not using the same wavelengths or whatever your connections that it takes when I’m trying to do other types of work. So that’s how I do that part of it.
Allison Sekuler:
When you’re done fixing up your house, come on over to mine. We’ve got a lot of work for you.
Cristine Aiken:
I’d love to.
Allison Sekuler:
Christine, it’s been so amazing talking to you and just hearing your perspective. What’s the one thing that you think people really need to take away about vascular dementia?
Cristine Aiken:
I think whether it’s vascular dementia or Lewy body or frontal temporal, whatever type it is, go get tested early and then get involved. Get involved with research and advocacy so that you can meet people and learn how to stay well for longer. Because for most of us, we want quality of life, not quantity. And that’s the bottom line of it all. We want a quality of life while we’re here, right?
Allison Sekuler:
Well said. Thank you so much for joining us here today.
Cristine Aiken:
Thank you for having me. It was lovely.
Jay Ingram:
Yes, thank you.
Allison Sekuler:
Christine Aiken is a dementia advocate and she joined us from Chilliwack, BC. She also blogs about her life and her blog can be found at chrissysjourney.com and we will have a link to Christine’s blog on our website.
Jay Ingram:
Our next guest has been listening to Christine Aiken’s story. Dr. Eric Smith is an expert on vascular dementia. He studies how diseases affecting the brain’s blood vessels along with events such as strokes can contribute to cognitive decline in dementia. Dr. Smith is a professor of neurology at the University of Calgary where he holds the Kathy Taylor chair in vascular dementia. He also works as a clinician at the university’s Cognitive Neurosciences Clinic where he diagnoses and cares for people living with vascular dementia, stroke, and other disorders affecting memory and thinking. Dr. Eric Smith joins us from Calgary, Alberta. Dr. Smith, thank you for helping us defy dementia.
Dr Eric Smith:
Oh, you’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Smith, what stood out most to you when you listened to Christine’s story?
Dr Eric Smith:
Well, that was a remarkable story that she tells very vividly. It’s emblematic of one of the two scenarios in which we see vascular dementia where there’s been a stroke and afterward there’s been a change in cognition, meaning memory thinking, other aspects of reasoning. The other scenario where we receive vascular dementia is where there isn’t a recent history of stroke, but there are cognitive symptoms and person goes to the doctor and has a brain scan that reveals that they’ve had silent strokes or other forms of vascular damage to the brain without realizing it. But Christina, the former where it started with a stroke where she recovered her movement ability and her speaking, but she was left with some of the symptoms that can be less visible to other people around her but are nonetheless very impactful. I’m pleased to hear that although she has effects from the stroke that she’s doing very well and has been very resilient in coping with them.
Allison Sekuler:
So when you talk about vascular dementia, exactly what is vascular dementia? What is it doing in the brain?
Dr Eric Smith:
Well, dementia is the medical term for problems with memory and thinking that cause some alteration in ability where people need help from others and that’s the name of the symptoms. And then there are different causes of which your audience is probably very familiar with Alzheimer’s disease as a cause, which is marked by plaques and tangles in the brain. Vascular dementia is caused by either disturbances in blood flow or hemorrhaging bleeding into the brain. The blood vessels act as pipes. The arteries take blood from the heart to the brain and then the veins return the blood back from the brain to the body and you can get blockages in the pipes and that’s what we call ischemic stroke where there’s damage to the brain from a block, usually it’s from a blood clot. The other kind about 10% is hemorrhagic stroke and that’s where there’s cracks in the pipes and the fluid leaks out, in this case blood, so it’s also called a bleeding kind of stroke. As I said, that’s the less common kind.
And then the pipes do other things too. They’re also like a means to flush things in and out of the brain. They play a role in clearing the brain from toxic waste and buildup. And so many people think that the main problem leading to Alzheimer’s disease is a failure to clear the protein called a beta that builds up to form plaques and that the vascular system plays a key role in that. So our brain needs blood delivered constantly to thrive. It uses a lot of energy and when that process is interrupted, that’s where you can get memory and thinking problems that lead to vascular dementia.
Jay Ingram:
Now there is a term cerebrovascular disease. How does that differ from vascular dementia?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah. Cerebral vascular disease refers to the processes affecting the vessels, cerebral being Greek for brain and vascular pertaining to the blood vessels. So it refers to the different conditions that can affect the blood vessels, of which there’s quite a variety. So it includes things like high blood pressure causes what in lay terms is called hardening of the arteries. One of the other things that’s interesting about the brain is the blood is not constantly delivered at the same rate across the brain at all times. It’s regulated. It’s almost like there’s a series of little valves and if part of your brain is working harder, the valve needs to be open so more blood gets there. If you’re not using part of the brain, it doesn’t need as much energy and the valve gets closed a little bit.
And so that’s another process that gets disturbed with cerebrovascular disease and we think is also related to the problems with memory and thinking. That it’s just an alteration in this reactivity of the blood vessels. So the blood flow is not regulated properly to the brain in addition to getting damage to the brain from the ischemia, meaning damage from lack of blood flow or hemorrhaging.
Allison Sekuler:
Yeah. So how common is this cerebrovascular disease in people and how big is the risk that it could develop into vascular dementia later?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah. Well, it’s pretty common and a reason we all should be thinking about vascular health as part of brain health. So we can see the presymptomatic beginnings of these processes in many older people. So for example, up to about 20% of people in their 80s have evidence of silent strokes. So this would be a small area of damage to the brain from low blood flow. The radiological and medical term is infarction when it’s asymptomatic. So we can see silent or some people call them covert because they’re not good. And actually people that have these so called silent findings tend to score lower on neuropsychological tests than others, even if they don’t have any overt symptoms of the problem. But we know that’s a brain at risk and having these silent findings mean a two to threefold higher future hazard of getting dementia.
So these findings are very common in the elderly. Many times they’re presymptomatic, but in some people they accrue over time and lead to overt symptoms. Pure vascular dementia is the cause of about 8 to 10% of all cases of dementia. So you just take everyone with dementia, how many have been diagnosed with pure vascular dementia, it’s a minority. The most common clinical diagnosis would be Alzheimer’s disease, but more than half of people with Alzheimer’s disease also have these vascular changes and they add up to be a double hit, like a double whammy for brain function. And so it’s very common to see in someone whose brain is now affected by dementia to find Alzheimer’s disease as the major player, but cerebrovascular disease as a minor player. So we think that preventing and treating cerebrovascular disease is going to not just reduce the incidence of vascular dementia, it’s going to reduce the number of people that have symptoms from Alzheimer’s disease too.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Smith, you mentioned that there are events that are covert, that the person is not aware of them. Christine had some of those. Is there any way that people can recognize that there is blood vessel damage happening in their brains even though they may not have symptoms?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah. Christine’s story is not unusual, although it’s not the rule either, but about 20 to 25% of people have a stroke that are preceded by TIAs. The challenge is not everyone seeks medical attention when these occur, because by definition they go away. Often they might last like 5 or 10 minutes would be typical on average and people might come up with an excuse, “Oh, maybe I was just tired. I’ll take a nap and see if it gets better,” this kind of thing. Unfortunately, I hear that story many times when people have had a stroke.
If you present for medical attention by going to an emergency room or walk-in clinic, if it’s recent, certainly go if the symptoms are still ongoing. There’s a chance that you could have testing that might identify treatable causes or risk factors for TIA. That includes that a doctor might recommend you begin taking a daily aspirin if it was felt the TIA was caused by a blood clot. Aspirin has a mild blood thinning effects and is a proven treatment to reduce risk of stroke in those who’ve had a TIA or have had a stroke already. They should also do a scan of the blood vessels of the brain. It may be that some of the blood vessels are partly choked off by cholesterol buildup and there could be procedures to alleviate that. So there’s quite a few things doctors can look into to investigate someone’s vascular health, understand whether they’re at risk and potential strategies to reduce the risk.
Jay Ingram:
We mentioned earlier that vascular dementia is often co-culprit with another kind of dementia, especially true of vascular with Alzheimer’s disease. Now in a case like that, does on help trigger the other or are they occurring independently?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah, that’s a great question. The covert strokes and overt strokes, like clinically symptomatic ones we see in patients seem to be mostly independent of having Alzheimer’s disease. On the other hand, we know that vascular function, like this kind of clearance phenomenon of flushing the beta peptide from the brain seems to be integral to the process of getting Alzheimer’s disease.
So the vascular system is a very important system that seems to be failing in some way when people get Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s most people with Alzheimer’s disease don’t have a history of stroke. So the one is not fully dependent on the other, although the integrated functioning of what’s been called the neurovascular unit, which is kind of the operating unit of the brain, which includes not only the neurons, the brain cells that are like firing and doing the computing, but also the support cells like the astrocytes and the blood vessels, which are bringing the energy to support that unit and taking the waste away. So we know that the vascular part of the neurovascular unit is very integrated with the problems that are evolving in Alzheimer’s disease.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Smith, Christine described how she’s trying to maintain her cognitive health after a debilitating stroke. How forgiving is the brain after a stroke? I mean, can you somehow slow down any damage that might continue?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah. The brain exhibits a remarkable phenomenon called plasticity, it changes. That’s how we understand and learn things. It means that the cells that were lost from the stroke can form new synaptic connections and work to regain some of the functions that were lost. So we often see that people whose cognition is affected by a stroke will show improvement. It can lag behind the recovery of paralysis or other functions and can take up to 6 to 12 months, but there is a lot of opportunity there. There are allied health professionals such as occupational therapists and neuropsychologists that can assess this and also offer strategies for what we call accommodation, which means that of the symptoms that remain, how do I live my best life despite them? For example, if memory is a problem, then keeping a calendar on the fridge for upcoming appointments, a simple thing that can help.
Finally, another focus after stroke, of course, is to prevent another one. If you’ve had a stroke, then obviously you’re at risk for stroke by virtue of having one. So physicians will look and optimize risk factors and sometimes recommend treatments for stroke prevention like aspirin.
Allison Sekuler:
So what can we do to maintain cerebrovascular health and lower our dementia risk?
Dr Eric Smith:
Well, it’s never too late to start and there are things that people can do at any age to promote their brain health and promote a healthy vascular system. And one thing we’ve learned from the epidemiology of dementia is that nearly all the risk factors for dementia are also risk factors for heart disease and stroke. So if you’re optimizing your heart health, you’re optimizing your brain health too.
And that starts with probably a lot of things your grandmother would tell you was good advice for healthy living, which includes eat well, get good sleep, cultivate relationships with people, smoking cessation, avoiding excessive alcohol use, take care of your mental health as well as your physical health. It also includes having a family doctor. One of the most important things you can do for your brain health is to have your blood pressure checked. We talked about silent or covert phenomena, well high blood pressure is a great example of that something that’s very simple and easily measurable, but often comes with no symptoms until a major event like a stroke or a heart attack. But we also see that as the cause of these covert lesions seen on MRI scans as well and it’s a major cause of vascular dementia. So I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to get your blood pressure checked.
Allison Sekuler:
Yeah. Just following up on that, I mean, there’s now all of these at home blood pressure checking devices and your Apple Watch can do things as well. How useful are those sorts of at-home tools compared to things you might find in a physician’s office?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah, I think that’s a great adjunct with the caveat that a lot of the algorithms on these wearable devices are set to be … Well, they’re neither completely sensitive nor specific. Sensitive means they could still miss some cases of high blood pressure or others. So they don’t replace having a family physician and having routine screening for health conditions.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Smith, I don’t take my blood pressure with a watch, anything wearable, but I do have one of those home blood pressure monitors with a cuff like the ones you see in a doctor’s office. Are they more consistently accurate?
Dr Eric Smith:
Yeah, that’s another fantastic device for people to have and they are more accurate than watches and other wearables. One of the reason they’re so useful is you can take your blood pressure at home at a consistent time in the day. People recommend the morning. Just relax for five minutes, take the blood pressure. You’ll often get readings that are closer to your true resting blood pressure than readings in the doctor’s office where oftentimes you’re stressed from finding parking and finding the office. So we know that blood pressure measurements in the doctor’s office often overestimate blood pressure. And I always recommend to my patients to get a home monitor and then when they come to me bring the readings from the monitor, like write them down in a diary or show them to me on the device and I can compare that to the office readings. You could even bring your monitor into the office to check it at the same time to make sure it’s calibrated well with the devices that are used in the doctor’s office.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Smith, thank you for enlightening us about vascular dementia and thank you for helping us defy dementia.
Allison Sekuler:
Yes, thank you.
Dr Eric Smith:
Thank you so much for having me.
Jay Ingram:
Dr. Eric Smith is a neurologist at the University of Calgary and a clinician at the university’s Cognitive Neurosciences Clinic and Foothills Medical Center. He joined us from Calgary.
Allison Sekuler:
So Jay, such interesting stories and information, what are your thoughts?
Jay Ingram:
Many, but I think the basic stuff is what intrigues me the most. The brain at rest takes 20% of the energy distributed to the body through the heart, through circulation and that’s for an organ that only is 2% of body weight. So that’s one thing. The other thing that really strikes me is that we talk a lot about the 14 risks for dementia that The Lancet has identified and they estimate that eight of those and maybe a couple more actually involve blood supply to the brain. So we are talking about a central event in the whole dementia picture. What did you take away from all this?
Allison Sekuler:
Yeah, the same thing that you were saying. I mean, we’ve said a number of times, if it’s good for the heart, it’s good for the brain, and that’s because it’s good for the way that the blood is circulating through the body. The interconnectedness is really important. But the other thing that really strikes me, and this is partly from the discussion and partly from just my own personal experience with friends and family, this idea that there can be things happening in your brain, these brain events, these vascular events, whether it’s a covert sort of a stroke or even something like a pulmonary embolism, people aren’t always even aware that these things are going on in their body or they might say, “Oh, maybe it’s just that I’m tired or my leg, I sprained my leg.” But maybe you’ve got a deep vein thrombosis and you’ve got a blood clot and if it’s, again, cutting off some of the flow there, it’s going to have potentially effects downstream as well.
And the most important thing for folks to take home is that if you feel like something is wrong, get to a doctor as soon as you can. And there’s actually a nice mnemonic that you can use as a warning sign of a stroke and it’s called BE FAST, B for balance loss, E for eye and vision changes, F for face drooping or twisting or asymmetry, A for arm weakness and S for speech difficulty and the T is really a call to action. If you’re feeling any of those sorts of things noticing it in yourself or someone else, it is time to call 911 and get to a doctor as soon as you can because with modern medicine, the sooner you can get to a doctor, the more they can do to minimize the damage.
Jay Ingram:
To find out more about how you can boost your brain health and reduce the risk of dementia or slow its progression, please visit us at defydementia.org. There you can check out other episodes of the podcast as well as our videos, infographics, and other resources.
Allison Sekuler:
And we’d really like to hear from you because this December we’re putting together our very first Defy Dementia Question Show.
Jay Ingram:
So if you’ve been wondering say exactly what kind of physical exercise is best for brain health or anything else that we’ve covered on the show, send us your questions and we’ll find the answers. Email us at Defydementia, that’s one word @baycrest.org and write question show in the subject line.
Allison Sekuler:
Our podcast production team is Rosanne Aleong and Sylvain Dubroqua. Production is by PodText. Music is by Steve Dodd. Our cover art is by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby and our writer and Chase producer is Ben Schaub.
Jay Ingram:
We are grateful to Heart and Stroke for their advice and help with this episode. We have links on our website to information from Heart and Stroke about stroke awareness as Allison was discussing and vascular risk reduction. And as always, we’re grateful to the funders of this podcast, the Slaight Family Foundation, the Centre for Aging + Brain Health Innovation and Baycrest.
Allison Sekuler:
We also appreciate your support too. So please click that subscribe button for Defy Dementia wherever you get your pods and don’t forget to leave a like, a comment, or maybe even a five-star review.
Jay Ingram:
Next time on Defy Dementia, The Brain Benefits of Improv. Improv is a kind of live theater where performers make up characters and plots on the spot without a script.
Allison Sekuler:
Improv actually something that I’ve been doing for decades and I’m really into it as a recreational and fun activity and I can tell you from personal experience that at least for me, it exercises the brain, it reduces stress and it really encourages people to get social with each other and those are all brain healthy activities.
Jay Ingram:
But to what extent might improv actually enable healthy aging and enhance wellbeing and brain health? That’s something we’re going to explore with the help of some improv performers and of course Allison is going to be one of those.
Allison Sekuler:
We’ve got improv on the brain next time on Defy Dementia. I’m Allison Sekuler.
Jay Ingram:
And I’m Jay Ingram. Thank you for listening to Defy Dementia and don’t ever forget you’re never too young or too old to take care of your brain.