It's interesting to look at the list of factors from the article - there's an obvious set of physical factors (obesity, cholesterol, smoking, etc), and then there's things like hearing loss, social isolation, and now visual loss, that all seem to be associated with less input to the brain or less informational processing. There's also the studies around staying cognitively active - my understanding is a lot of that is building additional capacity so the effects of dementia & Alzheimers are less noticeable, but it's interesting to see this kind of almost "hardware/software" split in the risk factors.
Depression is an interesting one because it's so multicausal that I'd almost wonder if it's a comorbidity, rather than a risk factor.
For anyone who wants to help do something about dementia, at least in a tiny way, and is perhaps concerned about their own risk of dementia there is a pretty easy way you can contribute.
For observational studies the data has often already been collected. Annually survey a few tens of thousands of people, anonymize that, store it... in 10 or 20 years you go back and see how those people did. Induct a new cohort each year.
The same base data can be used for an infinite number of studies.
I see what you’re saying but I felt like the whole article was informative, save the anecdote in the middle about how horrible Alzheimer’s is (I already know). There are 14 factors associated with dementia, most of which I wasn’t aware of.
I’m with you on the war against click bait though.
This is just press as a whole history. Even if your goals are altruistic the old press days still wanted people properly informed, and not just reading a tweet.
In the most mechanical way, you can consider this "click bait", but click bait carries a connotation of misleading the reader, not simply invoking curiosity to read the full story.
Depression is an interesting one because it's so multicausal that I'd almost wonder if it's a comorbidity, rather than a risk factor.