Reading the symptoms of dementia scare me. I’ve spent the day watching YouTube videos of people with dementia and doing tests that are used to diagnose dementia. (I passed them all, they were simple.)
Is there a lifestyle component? Like if I lived in a shack by the beach and ate seafood every day and only had a radio and the beach itself as entertainment and simple chores like cleaning and maintaining restrooms - I’m describing a man I met who ran a camping ground in Baja California - would that lifestyle lead to dementia? It seems peaceful, but there would always be that thing in the back of my mind after knowing of its existence like the need for paramedics and antibiotics. This is the fantasy I have lingering in my brain which prevents me from going through all the social anxiety and political stress of going through college. I’m scared I’ll never have free time I can enjoy ever again and that I’ll never be doing something “official” for a living.
I’m an aged care nurse who works with people with dementia. Dementia is caused by a build up of abnormal tau proteins in the brain (Sometimes lewy bodies can also build up and cause dementia). The reason why some people build up these proteins and not others isn’t well understood. But there is evidence to suggest that keeping your mind active by doing puzzles, teaching yourself music, learning a language…Basically anything that makes your brain have to work hard is a protective factor. There isn’t any evidence that I’m aware of that schizophrenics are more likely to develop dementia than non-schizophrenics. People with schizophrenia may have cognitive issues but that isn’t the same thing as dementia. You can undo cognitive deficits but you can’t undo a dementing process. I hope this helps.
In case anyone is interested: 28.9756898,-113.546633 on Google Earth. It was a place like this.
But now the whole world is connected via smartphone and this Google Earth stuff did not exist the time I went. It was a local secret back then.
edit- Well, to be fair that time I went you could see satellites whiz by the night sky / iridium flares every few minutes.
edit- Idk, something very radical is happening to the planet with all these smartphones. I wish I could disconnect, but you really can’t. A symptom of this radical change is what I overheard some people say behind us at the movies during a commercial about VR technology: “why travel the world when you can buy that VR headset and do it from your own room?”.