In the legend of the Buddha in ancient India, the young prince Siddhartha lived a sheltered life before being shocked out of his complacency when he witnessed the realities of old age, sickness and death during a series of rare excursions from his gilded palace. These heralds of physical degeneration famously led him on a quest to find the universal source of suffering and to his own enlightenment as a Buddha (“awakened one”).
Today, science is exploring how the mind-training practices of meditation popularized by Buddhism and its secular offshoot, mindfulness, can help ameliorate some of the fast-growing costs of aging—notably dementia and the risk of Alzheimer's. But meditation is only part of a suite of complementary practices that are emphasizing quality of life in the face of cognitive decline.
Since 2008, Dr Helen Lavretsky, professor-in-residence at the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, has overseen some of the longest studies of the effects of mind-body practices on the brain and cognition in older adults. She has also focused on depression and anxiety as factors that aggravate cognitive decline.
“The evidence is accumulating that these practices have neuroplastic effects on the brain, and they do delay cognitive decline in older adults,” Lavretsky says. “They have an effect on [the enzyme] telomerase, which is a cellular biomarker of aging, and they definitely improve inflammation and antiviral activity”
According to the 2021 report by Alzheimer's Diseas International (ADI), an international federation of 75 Alzheimer associations across the globe, dementia affects 55 million people worldwide. That figure is set to rise to 78 million by 2030—creating what the federation's CEO, Paola Barbarino, refers to as a “perfect storm gathering on the horizon.” But even those figures may be misleading.
While the global prevalence of dementia has more than doubled since 1990 due to an aging population, ADI estimates that 75 percent of
