Dementia 10X lower in a group who are outdoors a lot and eat unprocessed foods

Amazonian Indigenous Groups Have World's Lowest Rate of Dementia

By Medscape Staff

Lack of contact with the outside world and an active lifestyle could play a role in why indigenous groups in the remote Amazon of Bolivia have some of the lowest rates of dementia in the world.   

What to know:

  • Only about  1% of members of the Tsimane and Moseten peoples of the Bolivian Amazon suffer from dementia,  compared with  11% of people aged 65 and older in the United States .

  • Underscoring  the profound relationship between lifestyle and cognitive health , something about the  preindustrial subsistence lifestyle of the groups appears to protect  older tribe members from dementia.

  • The rate of mild cognitive impairment generally accepted as typical in aging is  comparable between the tribes and rates in developed countries  such as the United States.

  • The Tsimane and Moseten people remain very physically active throughout their lives  by fishing, hunting, and farming and  experience less brain atrophy than their American  and European peers.

  • Indigenous populations elsewhere in the world have been found to have high rates of dementia , which are attributed to  more contact  with their nonindigenous neighbors and  adoption of their lifestyles.

This is a summary of the article, "Study: Some of the world's lowest rates of dementia found in Amazonian indigenous groups," published by Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, on March 9, 2022. The full article can be found on news.ucsb.edu.

Prevalence of dementia and mild cognitive impairment in indigenous Bolivian forager-horticulturalists 📄 PDF


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Tags: Cognitive