Today’s Brain Booster is: Look after your eyes to stay sharp and wise.
Maintaining good eyesight, and treating vision loss, can help reduce the risk of developing dementia. Conversely, the greater a person’s vision loss, the greater their risk of dementia.
Fortunately for me, that does NOT include long and short-sightedness, technically known as hyperopia and myopia. I’ve had myopia since I was 18 years old.
Long and short-sightedness don’t increase the risk of dementia — provided you wear the appropriate glasses — because unlike eye diseases, like diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma — which involve active tissue degeneration — short and long-sightedness are simply refractive errors caused by the physical shape of your eyeball or cornea. So needing reading glasses is not a dementia risk
And even with eye diseases, if you correct the vision loss, the increased likelihood of dementia diminishes significantly — if not disappears entirely — depending on what caused the vision loss in the first place.
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Today’s Health Headline is: Childhood trauma impacts long term health.
Think of childhood as a trek through the years carrying a backpack, which gets filled with mementos of the child’s adventures and life events. If a child experiences severe, repeated stress — such as abuse, neglect, or growing up around addiction — it’s like adding heavy rocks to their backpack every day.
Living in fear or chaos means a child’s internal alarm system (the fright or flight stress response mediated by our sympathetic nervous system) stays turned on all the time. Instead of returning to normal when things are calm, their body is constantly flooded with stress hormones because they’re continually on edge for the next bad thing to happen. Over time, this persistent high alert state causes physical wear and tear on their brain and body. It changes how their brain develops, weakens their immune system, and leads to chronic inflammation.
By the time the child becomes an adult, carrying that heavy backpack for decades takes a toll. The strain manifests as chronic physical problems like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or autoimmune issues, and mental health challenges like severe depression or anxiety.
Childhood trauma is NOT something you just ‘get over’. It gets under your skin and physically changes how your brain and body function, which directly impacts your health in adulthood.
But it’s not all bad news. Researchers have discovered a powerful antidote. Tune into this week’s podcast episode to find out what it is.
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What’s Missing From Modern Medicine is asking the right questions.
I said the same thing last week. Modern medicine is focused on the wrong questions, which is why it’s not stemming the epidemic of chronic diseases.
Instead of doctors asking: So tell me what’s WRONG with you?
Doctors need to be asking: Tell me what HAPPENED to you?
Looking at the bigger picture of a person’s life, and addressing trauma and chronic stress, is absolutely essential to compassionate and effective healthcare.
There is an undeniable link between adverse life experiences and:
- long-term physical and mental diseases
- disordered eating
- obesity
- substance abuse
- and dementia.
Sadly, standard medical models operate under severe systemic constraints that preclude addressing the factors that would reverse these conditions. The two main barriers are lack of time (as in ridiculously short doctor appointments) and a glaring deficit in medical school education regarding nervous system regulation.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait for the entire medical system to change to protect your own nervous system. Begin your healing journey by listening to today’s episode.
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Today’s Whether question from Wendy prompted today’s Health Headline:
I’d like to know whether childhood trauma can increase the risk of developing dementia later in life?
Yes, adverse childhood experiences significantly increase the risk of developing dementia later in life.
I emphasis the word ‘later’ because there also exists childhood dementia.
This refers to a group of rare, progressive, genetic and metabolic disorders that cause harmful by-products of metabolism to build up in the brain and cause neurodegeneration. This means there is ongoing irreversible loss of brain cell structure or function, which ultimately leads to neuronal cell death.
The hallmark of childhood dementia is developmental regression — the tragic loss of previously acquired skills like speaking, reading, writing, focusing, and recognising their family and friends. Because childhood dementias are strictly genetic, factors like developmental trauma can’t cause or trigger childhood dementia.
However with adult-onset dementia, it’s a different story altogether. The more childhood traumas a person experiences, the higher their likelihood of cognitive decline and dementia in old age. The good news is that there’s time to turn things around.
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Click here to watch the episode on my YouTube channel, or listen to Healing with Dr Helena on your preferred podcast platform. I’ll publish a new episode every Monday, and you’ll receive an email notification that morning. Please subscribe to my podcast or YouTube channel so that you don’t miss an episode, and send your whether questions to: podcast@drhelenapopovic.com
If you’re happy for me to play your voice on my podcast, you can provide an audio file. Otherwise, you can type your question for me to read out.
I very much look forward to answering your questions, and exploring how we can all build a smarter brain, stronger body and deeply fulfilling life.
Please share this Health-e-Byte with anyone who has a chronic disease.
