Does brain health have to fade as we age?

Many people live in fear of age-related brain decline, but some experts believe that's an overreaction. Alvaro Fernandez talks about the changing scope of aging related to the brain.

Transcript

00:00

Having moved around in careers, in universities, in cities, I think something that people are starting to realize, well, where you live is

00:07

going to make a big difference.

00:16

But that's a big misconception. So first of all, I don't like the word aging because every of us, no matter our age,

00:22

we all age one day at a time. So there's no magical age where we start aging. I think it's our living.

00:29

So the question is, how do we maximize our life trajectory to keep up and to delay decline?

00:37

Knowing that our environment our lifestyle, in most factors that matter, is more important than genetics.

00:43

And that's very important for people to understand. If we understand that premise, we don't have to accept aging as inevitable decline.

00:53

Long-term, we all die, right? So you could say, yeah, of course, there's decline because, at some point, we all die. But that trajectory, we have a lot of influence over that.

01:02

Is it going to be looking more like this? Is it going to look more like that? A lot of research short-term, long-term,

01:10

proving viability based on education levels, based on lifestyle, based on nutrition, based on different factors that help

01:17

understand how to harness genes in the right direction in different ways, one by selecting

01:24

the right environment. And I say this also from a point of view of being from Spain originally, coming to the US

01:30

having moved around in careers, in universities, in cities. I think something that people are starting to realize,

01:37

well, where you live is going to make a big difference because it's your job, it's your family, it's your environment.

01:43

Then what do you do in your day to day? What career? How do you react to your environment? So aging does not involve the automatic decline.

01:53

There is a predisposition towards decline. But most of what we think is decline is not genetics.