Today’s Brain Booster is: Look after your eyes to stay sharp and wise.
Maintaining good eyesight, and treating vision loss, can help reduce the risk of developing dementia. Conversely, the greater a person’s vision loss, the greater their risk of dementia.
Fortunately, this does NOT include long and short-sightedness. Needing reading glasses is not a dementia risk.
Even with eye diseases, if you correct the vision loss, the increased likelihood of dementia diminishes significantly — if not disappears entirely — depending on what caused the vision loss in the first place.
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Today’s Health Headline is: Childhood trauma impacts long term health.
Think of childhood as a trek through the years carrying a backpack, which gets filled with mementos of the child’s adventures and life events. If a child experiences severe, repeated stress — such as abuse, neglect, or growing up around addiction — it’s like adding heavy rocks to their backpack every day.
Living in fear or chaos means a child’s internal alarm system (the fright or flight stress response mediated by our sympathetic nervous system) stays turned on all the time. Instead of returning to normal when things are calm, their body is constantly flooded with stress hormones because they’re continually on edge for the next bad thing to happen. Over time, this persistent high alert state causes physical wear and tear on their brain and body. It changes how their brain develops, weakens their immune system, and leads to chronic inflammation.
By the time the child becomes an adult, carrying that heavy backpack for decades takes a toll. The strain manifests as chronic physical problems like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or autoimmune issues, and mental health challenges like severe depression or anxiety.
Childhood trauma is NOT something you just ‘get over’. It gets under your skin and physically changes how your brain and body function, which directly impacts your health in adulthood.
But it’s not all bad news. Researchers have discovered a powerful antidote. Tune into this week’s podcast episode to find out what it is.
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What’s Missing From Modern Medicine is asking the right questions.
I said the same thing last week. Modern medicine is focused on the wrong questions, which is why it’s not stemming the epidemic of chronic diseases.
Instead of doctors asking: So tell me what’s WRONG with you?
Doctors need to be asking: Tell me what HAPPENED to you?
Looking at the bigger picture of a person’s life, and addressing trauma and chronic stress, is absolutely essential to compassionate and effective healthcare.
There is an undeniable link between adverse life experiences and:
- long-term physical and mental diseases
- disordered eating
- obesity
- substance abuse
- and dementia.
Sadly, standard medical models operate under severe systemic constraints that preclude addressing the factors that would reverse these conditions. The two main barriers are lack of time (as in ridiculously short doctor appointments) and a glaring deficit in medical school education regarding nervous system regulation.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait for the entire medical system to change to protect your own nervous system. Begin your healing journey by listening to today’s episode.
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Today’s Whether question from Wendy prompted today’s Health Headline:
I’d like to know whether childhood trauma can increase the risk of developing dementia later in life?
Yes, adverse childhood experiences significantly increase the risk of developing dementia later in life. Tune in to find out how to turn things around.
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Please subscribe to my podcast so that you don’t miss an episode, and email your whether questions to: podcast@drhelenapopovic.com
For resources and references visit: https://drhelenapopovic.com/podcast/
