Page 10 - BPWUK - E-news - Edition 106 - October 2022

He points to the late Queen. “It seems her brain was
as good as it ever was before she died. Obviously
you need a bit of luck, but people need to understand
what happens to us as we live longer. It’s not due to
the ageing process. It’s due to a loss of fit ness in the
body and mind.” Age, he says, only truly becomes a
contributory factor to cognitive decline “in the late
90s”.

If we can get it right, he explains in a Glaswegian ac-
cent that has been softened only a little by decades in
England, it would mark a dramatic shift in medical
priorities since he was a young man. “Fifty years ago,
everyone was thinking about children, not old people.
But I was interested in them, and thought the im-
portance of activity was neglected.” He calls exercise
“the miracle cure” with both emotional and cognitive
benefits. “Brisk walking is the key. Learning how to
do things for yourself. Weights and treadmill.”

He certainly seems active himself, publishing books
and campaigning well into older age. And he remains
influential – earlier this year, he was summoned to
Downing Street to see how his dementia program
might fit with a wider government 10-year strategy.

‘I could see population ageing seen as a
tidal wave of need. We had to have a sys-
tem for living longer, better.’

CREDIT: John Lawrence

That is a leap from an upbringing amid smoke and poverty in his native Glasgow, where his father,
who contracted hepatitis in the war, died when Muir was seven. “We never had a car, and everyone
had CLAB – coughing like a bastard,” he recalls of those days. But he got a good education and, be-
cause his mother’s family were farmers, initially trained to be a vet. Then he switched to medicine and,
while still in his 20s, became interested in public health. In the mid-1980s, his life was changed after a
woman died of cervical cancer under his watch. “I thought ‘this is a complete mess, it needs a system’.
So I just decided to set up a national cervical screening program.” On the back of that, he set up the
breast cancer screening program, and so it went on.
Such programs became ways of ensuring value – through prevention – in bureaucratic systems. “I still By
think healthcare is a huge mess,” he says. “But nor can it be viewed as a limitless resource. You can’t
just assume there will always be another X-ray.” As he got older himself, he realised that demography
would pose a fundamental challenge to that. allocation of resources. “I could see population ageing
seen as a tidal wave of need. We had to have a system for living longer, better.”

The Dementia Risk Reduction Program, with six monthly podcasts packed with tips, is his contribu-
tion to that goal. The prize is huge, he thinks. “Dementia is one of the big issues, but the good news is
we can probably reduce it by about 40 per cent.”

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