When it comes to our physical health we know we need to eat healthy and exercise to keep our bodies strong. But what about taking care of our brains? The brain affects how we think, feel and act. By keeping your brain active and engaged, you can keep your brain healthy. Avera neurologist, Bill Andrews, MD, explains how to improve your cognitive health in this Avera Medical Minute.
Why is brain health important?
I think brain health is important because our brains are extremely important. If you think about what brought me into medicine and seeing what happens to people when things go wrong with the brain - for the patients that have stroke, or have memory issues it really hits the core of who you are and how you function as a person. So our brains are important, keeping them healthy and keeping them performing at an optimal level is important.
What can we do when we are younger to help our brain health?
A good foundation of brain health is very simple and consists of things that everyone knows of, so I talk about sleep as being an important aspect, as anyone who has experienced a poor night of sleep or been up all night knows the impact that can have on brain function. Exercise is probably right up there at the top with sleep, so studies have shown that regular exercise, specifically aerobic exercise three or four times a week, can not only improve cognitive function in the short term, but it can also have long term benefits in terms of protecting neurons in the brain and preventing neurological disease down the road.
What happens if we don’t take care of our brains?
It can affect multiple areas of your cognition. One of the big ones is memory, so things like short-term and long-term memory where you forget parts of a conversation that you had, you forget what your spouse told you yesterday. It can affect visual spatial functions, so you’re getting lost while driving, getting lost in familiar surroundings. And then executive function is another component of cognition, so how we piece tasks together, and language is another important function, so forgetting the word for something, not being able to name something, or forgetting the names of family members, relatives, things like that.
What are the benefits of focusing on the health of your brain?
Starting early in terms of brain habits like sleep, regular exercise, mental health, so treating conditions like depression and anxiety, avoiding exposures like smoking, excessive alcohol use. All those things are important early in life and even throughout the middle stages of life to keep our brains functioning well later into life but at the same time, it’s never too late to start.
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