In the end, people with zero of the tracked risk factors skirted dementia for 30.1 years, compared with just 17.5 in those with all three risk factors. What the study shows about how vascular risk factors affect agingWhile prior studies have tied various measures of poor heart health at midlife to greater dementia risk, these results have mostly reflected population-level patterns and relative lifetime risk. Some of that drop is the result of people with any of these heart-related risk factors dying sooner of non-dementia causes, for instance stroke or heart attack; the rest reflects people with such risk factors getting dementia earlier in life. The researchers also only checked people’s vascular risk factors at one moment in time. The post Avoiding these 3 risk factors might buy you 13 more dementia-free years appeared first on Washington Post.