To keep memory alive and prevent cognitive decline, which is the basis of dementia, “it is essential to adopt correct lifestyles: adequate amount of sleep, practice physical activity, follow a healthy diet without forgetting social life. Loneliness, especially among the elderly, it has negative effects on health like 6 glasses of wine or 15 cigarettes a day. Studies on over 300 thousand people tell us that subjects with a greater social connection also have an increased probability of survival of over 50%. %”. Word of Claudio Mencacci, emeritus director of Neurosciences at the Asst Fatebenefratelli-Sacco in Milan and co-president of Sinpf (Italian Society of Neuropsychopharmacology), who spoke at the press conference “Dementia and cognitive decline: the emergency arises in Italy too” , today at the Ministry of Health to present the ‘memory-saving’ project e-MemoryCare, a digital platform designed to ‘stimulate’ the brain, not only of those with a diagnosis of full-blown dementia and which for now involves 10,000 people (5 thousand in Rome and 5 thousand in Milan) who will receive the treatment free of charge.
“Social life can truly counteract cognitive decline – adds Mencacci – just as medical care and maintaining one’s general health conditions are indispensable, but combining the two things by involving the whole family remains central and the 10,000 cases that will come studied through the e-MemoryCare project will demonstrate this.”
And Mencacci has no doubts about the importance of the “memory-saving” project: “It is aimed at the elderly population so that it can counteract what is cognitive decline, that is, the condition by which attention, concentration and memory are reduced, which also reverberates on relational, emotional and work activities, can be quickly stopped, even interrupted”.
It is a “proposal to stimulate cognitive abilities – he concludes – above all a maintenance of the skills that the person must maintain and the possibility, through a re-enactment of memory, not only that of the environment and of his own time in which he lives, but also of the time where he is lived, of personal and family memories, of everything that concerned his life. This is the stimulus of that procedural memory which is a semantic, autobiographical, visual or auditory memory. This condition, together with adequate lifestyles, can really counteract cognitive decline.”
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