Over 3x Higher Dementia Risk in this Study Group

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Doing this was linked to an over three times higher risk for developing dementia, according to an incredibly important study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[00:00:10]This is important for everyone to know.

[00:00:12]I'm Dr. Austin Perlmutter. If you care about your brain health and like learning about how to rewire your brain for better health, be sure to follow this channel. So, this major study was published again in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the top journals on Earth. What they were looking at was roughly 50,000 people average age around 60 years old, where they tracked them for around 7 years on average. And this was an observational study where they were looking at the correlation between sedentary behavior.

[00:00:41]This is time spent not moving much, but also not sleeping against risk of developing dementia. The way they did the specific aspect of measuring sedentary behavior is they gave people a wrist accelerometer, which is a device that tracks how much people move around, and they measured over a 7-day period how much sedentary behavior people had.

[00:01:01]And then they again tracked them over the next 7 years to look at their chances of developing dementia. When they modeled this equation, they tried to account for things like people's diet, already existing conditions, APOE4 status, and they even accounted for whether people were engaging in moderate to vigorous intensity movement as recorded by that accelerometer. And here's what they found. Compared to people who were sedentary for around 9 hours a day, people who were sedentary for 12 hours a day had a hazard ratio of 1.6, meaning that they had about a 60% higher chance of developing dementia.

[00:01:36]Now, when you bump it up to around 15 hours a day, people had a hazard ratio of 3.2, meaning they were 3.2 times higher chances of developing dementia.

[00:01:47]So, what does this data mean? We know that sedentary behavior, which is actually very common, can link to issues with brain function because it changes things like the immune system, metabolism. We also know that engaging in various activities like exercise, but just things that are associated with physical activity can help to rewire the brain using neuroplasticity in a positive way.

[00:02:09]Some considerations around this specific study, however, is you have to worry about reverse causation, meaning is it possible that people were moving less because they already had brain issues.

[00:02:20]And they did try to account for this by doing a subsequent or middle of the road analysis several years into the study to look for people who had developed dementia early on and then accounting for that to make sure to mitigate some of that reverse causation. In addition, there are always other confounding variables that you can't exactly account for in a large observational study of this nature.

[00:02:41]But the main point from this study is that movement is strongly correlated with brain health and specifically moving more in any way, shape, or form is a good bet for brain health. I do want to say it's not the only variable, but it is one that is very important. I will link the study here. Follow for more.