How to prevent dementia: Could this Amazonian tribe hold the key? Incidence 80% lower than in the West

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Their lives are spent searching for food and moving around. They can travel 20 km (12.4 miles) during a hunt that can last eight hours. This is why researchers suggest that an 80-year-old Tsimane has the same physiology as a 50-year-old American.

Tsimane people walk, run, bike, and row boats up and down rivers from one place to another. They live in rural communities and don’t watch television because they don’t have electricity.

Researchers found that not only were their hearts healthier than people in Western countries, but their brains were also healthier.

One measure of a healthy brain is brain volume. As we age, our brains tend to shrink. Age-related brain volume loss among Tsimane people is much less than in people living in the West. This may explain why the incidence of dementia is 80% lower than in people in the United States or Europe.

Only about 1 percent of older people on Tsimane Island have dementia. In the United States, this number equates to 11 percent of people over 65. The obvious link is that what’s good for your heart is also good for your brain.

Their lifestyle is said to be pre-industrial. Other groups who benefited similarly from this lifestyle (they were more physically active, ate better diets, and lived in communities) were the ancient Greeks and Romans, who also , not coincidentally, suffered less from dementia than modern communities.

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There is little mention of memory loss in ancient texts. This is not because people did not live to a ripe old age, but because they did live to old age. The average lifespan in ancient Greece was about 70 years, and Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, is thought to have lived into his 80s, perhaps even his 90s.

Old texts describe many of the other ailments we associate with old age, such as loss of vision and hearing, and becoming frail and unable to move. But it’s not memory loss.

The Roman statesman Cicero described the “four evils” of old age. They become less active, weaker, older age deprives them of physical pleasures, and death approaches. He did not mention memory loss.

It would definitely be considered one of the evils of old age today, perhaps one of them. Albert Hoffman, chair of epidemiology and professor of public health and clinical epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, told me: “There must be a better way to die than dementia.”

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Dementia is currently the seventh leading cause of death worldwide and the number one cause of death in the UK.

Caleb Finch, a professor at the University of Southern California, says that good brain health in later life is “now known to be dependent on heart health.” He recently published a study that looked at lower levels of dementia in ancient Greeks and Romans and found that lifestyle factors such as diet and exercise were key.

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But the Tsimane case is puzzling, and it doesn’t fully explain why dementia is more prevalent in the United States than among them.

They walk up to 15,000 steps a day to farm and forage in the jungle, and their diet is low in fat, sugar, and salt. However, Finch says, “Tsimane people have high levels of systemic inflammation throughout their lives.”

Compared to other populations, Tsimane people have higher levels of inflammatory markers in their blood, about 1.5 times higher than people in the United States. One of her key biomarkers of inflammation, C-reactive protein (CRP), was termed “chronically elevated.”

So why are Tsimane people protected from the effects of inflammation, despite the lifelong risk of inflammatory processes?

Phytochemicals released by plants to protect themselves from bacteria and insects can stimulate the immune system of humans who spend long periods of time in environments such as forests and jungles.

The Tsimane also live in a natural environment, in contrast to our increasingly sterile environment. So perhaps their immune systems are always on high alert, anticipating the need to fight off bacteria and parasites.

Whatever the explanation, the lower risk of brain and heart disease among the Tsimane despite high levels of inflammation speaks to the power of their lifestyle. That means we can’t all live in the forest. Most of us don’t have access to a life of farming and foraging, even if the idea appeals to us.

But we can all eat better, engage with our communities, and move more.