Attention 40-year-olds: This may be the time to start thinking about maintaining your brain. One action item: Check your cholesterol.

Recent studies suggest that high cholesterol levels in midlife raise the risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia in later life.

“What’s good for the heart is good for the mind,” says researcher Rachel Whitmer of Kaiser Permanente. Her study, published in the journal Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, found that even borderline-high cholesterol levels (200 to 239 milligrams per deciliter) in middle age raised the risk of late-life dementia by about 50 percent.

Read the entire article:  Midlife Cholesterol Linked To Dementia : NPR

This entry was posted on Monday, August 10th, 2009 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Aging Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.