I'm actually thinking of asking my doctor to prescribe me metformin (most commonly used and cheap diabetes drug) just as a precaution. My mom has dementia and my father has Alzheimers, so I'm in the risk group.

So I'm worried, and I tried to make some use of my two masters degrees to figure out what research actually know about what to do to reduce the risk.

So here's the interesting thing and what I'm doing...

• FASTING: after looking in to the research, strangely enough it seems like intermittent fasting has a huge positive effect on the so called zombie cells that both increases inflamtions in our bodies (cause of most age related diseases including dementia). This from what I can find is the only thing that can actually turn our biological clock backwards in time. So I'm only eating lunch at 12 and dinner at 6pm. It doesn't really feel like fasting but it technically is. In one study fasting for five days three times in a year pulled back the groups biological age 2.5 years on an average. This turned out to way easier than I feared, probably because eating three times a day is a pretty modern invention and not something our bodies really need. When it comes to longevity and reducing the risk for dementia, this is probably the non medical strongest card there is to prevent dementia.

• SLEEP! Sleep is probably the thing most people don't think about when it comes to health and preventive medicine. If we sleep well though, it has a huge impact in the way the body can restore itself and keep the brain young. Getting bad sleep is like banging ones head with a bat and asking to get dementia and a shorter life. There's a strong link between people getting bad sleep getting all sorts of physical and mental problems including reducing the risk of Dementia. On the upside it also keeps you having a positive mood, being able to focus, learn, retain what you learn. It's strange to me that people dont talk more about how incredibly important good sleep is for health. It's the base. If you have shitty sleep forget about eating healthy or exercising.

• EXERCISE. Well do I need to say more? I think everyone by now know that exercising a few times a week has a huge positive impact on a lot of things, including inflammatory responses. Comparing it with the above, it's still not as good at reducing the risks as the above. I use my spinn bike 2 days a week and do HIIT between 15-30 minutes with my wife (favorite YT channel: growingananas).

Then we come to the wild card...

• METFORMIN:There was a huge study (20k participants) where the people WITH diabetes actually as a group 17% lived longer with diabetes than the healthy group. This was wild because it should have been the opposite. The reason: metformin. The most commonly used and cheap diabetes drug in the world. It both shows an affect in longevity AND reduces risk to get dementia related diseases. Its basically the anti aging drug that was accidentally found. I'm really hoping it's next study on healthy people only will get its full funding (I find it wild that a drug that's cheap and seems to keep us healthier doesn't get a ton of money from the government). Given that we both haven't gotten the money for the study l and the fact that it's not been performed yet - this is still a bit of a wildcard but I know a lot of scientist in longevity research eats this daily. The tricky thing is that I'll probably not get this prescribed because like another drug thats highly popular within the medical community (Statin: greatly reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases) it needs to be prescribed.

On top of this I'm gonna make sure my life isn't just work and then get I'll. On a population level we have a 20% likelyhood to be dead even before we reach normal retirement age. While the above reduces that risk by a lot, the risk of either being dead or having some age related disease is still not insignificant by age 65. So how to beat the odds? Well retire earlier than 65. I'm aiming at age 50-55. That's actually easier than I thought since saving 1% extra of ones yearly salary usually reduces one year you have to work ( if starting to save at age 30). Given that I do save more than that, I'll probably gonna be able to reduce how much I work from age 47 if I want to.the thing is that I really enjoy my work in tech, I'm absolutely not someone who dislikes work. Also keeping the brain busy is key to avoid dementia. Im probably more of the kind of person who wants to find my optimal balance between work and leisure. I'm guessing that's about three days of work and four days of hobbies. I'll experiment with that as I reach my financial goals to achieve /r/fire (financial independence retire early).

Finally I try my best to always seek balance. If I want a breakfast, I still eat it. If I want to drink beers or stay up late to play PS5 with my friend, I do it. Denying oneself is not a good life and it usually makes it way more difficult to stay on the path I ahve chosen. If I want to splurge on buying something, I do it even if it will delay my goal of reaching partial early retirement. An example of this is my boat that I should have named "Sailing vessel black hole" beucase the amount of money she eats. But my goal is living a good long good life - not to save money (that's just one of the tools to achieve it).

That's my five cents on trying my best to avoid dementia and Alzheimers.