Page 8 - BPWUK - E-news - Edition 106 - October 2022

‘It’s never too early and never too late to reduce your risk of dementia’

Public health expert Prof Sir Muir Gray thinks we’ve overemphasized the effects of ageing on the
brain – and we need a dose of self-reliance
There is an irony about Sir Muir Gray’s campaign against dementia,

Dementia Risk Reduction Program, which launched on October 1. The 78-year-old doctor, who
founded the NHS’s disease screening programs, has spent his career thinking hard about how the NHS
can function better, and offer better value, particularly for the elderly.

But among the patient stories which best exemplify his general philosophy about healthcare systems
and the old, is the very specific, personal story of someone young: his daughter Tat.
Now in her 30s, she developed type 1 diabetes in her teens and then broke her back skiing. It led, says
Sir Muir, to a decade of pain, to “10 years of problems not being resolved medically until she decided
‘this can’t go on and went to a gym and sorted herself out’.”

And Gray thinks that message of self-reliance has ramifications far beyond Tat. “Healthcare is what
you do for yourself,” he says. “It is the most important care, followed by informal care by friends,
family and volunteers. Then comes professional care.”

It is a DIY attitude, he says, that can help Britons prevent the diseases of old age ruining their lives, or
even getting a grip in the first place. An attitude which focuses on maintaining or recovering strength,
stamina, suppleness and sociability whose loss many of us assume is an inevitable consequence of
ageing, and so compressing the period of serious debility until as soon as possible before death.
Not that Gray, who spent many years at the top of the NHS, dismisses the brilliance or necessity of
doctors and medicine. It’s simply that “over the last 40 years, the health service has become a bit fo-
cused only on drugs and technology”. And as it has done so, he thinks, we patients have become pas-
sive about our own health, particularly when it comes to dementia.

But that, he says, is partly because “we’re confused – and even doctors are confused –about the rela-
tionship between dementia and Alzheimer’s”. We tend to lump them together. But Alzheimer’s, about
which we still have so much to learn, is just one cause of the major cognitive problems – not being
able to manage finances, or find your way home– we know as dementia. Yet there are several other
causes, and they are much more tractable than Alzheimer’s. “And the research is now very strong
about these other causes and how they can be modified.” The result, he says, is that “it is never too
early, and never too late to reduce your risk of dementia”. Indeed, as a man whose career has been
about translating evidence-based medicine into policy making, he says the time has now come to put
these findings – that many causes of dementia are not fated, but can be ducked and delayed –
into action.