Dementia is a canopy term for a collection of symptoms caused by disorders that affect the brain, including devastating diseases like the most common form of dementia—Alzheimer’s disease.

Millions of people in the U.S. alone are living with Alzheimer’s. It can be challenging to watch someone you love deal with symptoms of dementia, often including memory loss and trouble with language, along with personality changes, delusions, agitation, and less ability to solve problems or control their emotions. It’s important to note that although dementia risk increases with age, it is not part of the normal aging process.

Dementia Can Strike Early

Dementia can strike people as early as 30 years old. It’s certainly clear that there’s a lot of pain and suffering involved with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Drugs have consistently come up short when it comes to curing the disease. Natural supplements, diet, and exercise can reverse dementia and Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Lower Your Risk of Dementia

Avoid processed foods. Favoring an alkaline diet and exercising lower your risk of dementia. There are other relatively simple, meaningful steps you could take to lower your risk too.

• Avoid high copper levels in the water. We need trace amounts of the heavy metal copper to survive because it’s vital for bone, hormonal, and nerve health. However, too much of a good thing could be bad for our brain. A study found that copper can trigger the disease. The study found that copper in drinking water at levels one-tenth of the EPA standard caused a toxic accumulation of the pro-Alzheimer’s protein amyloid-beta.
• The researchers can’t yet say what the exact “level of too much copper” is, but if you have copper water pipes, getting your water tested for excess copper is an excellent place to start.
• Avoid products containing aluminum, an environmentally abundant metal that has long been implicated in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

Tinnitus and Dementia

Tinnitus was significantly associated with dementia occurrences in the 30–64 year age range. Tinnitus was associated with a 63% higher risk of early-onset dementia. Dementia is generally regarded as a multifactorial disease, and its incidence increases with age.

What Is Dementia?

Dementia is not a specific disease but a group of disorders characterized by the deterioration of at least two brain functions — memory and reason.

Signs and symptoms of dementia result when once-healthy neurons or nerve cells in the brain stop working, lose connections with other brain cells, and die. While everyone loses some neurons as they age, people with dementia experience far more significant losses.

Dementia symptoms lead to the loss of cognitive functioning such as thinking, remembering, and reasoning to such an extent that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities.

Dementia is more common as people grow older (about one-third of all people age 85 or older may have some form of dementia), but it is not a normal part of aging. Many people live into their 90s and beyond without signs of dementia.

Common Early Symptoms of Dementia

• Communication problems
• Difficulty concentrating
• Finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks, such as getting confused over the correct change when shopping
• Struggling to follow a conversation or find the right word
• People with dementia cannot control their emotions
• Being confused about time and place
• Memory loss
• Repetition
• Getting lost
• Personality or mood changes
• Ringing in the ears (Tinnitus)

Herbs That Can Provide Cognitive Relief to Those Living with Dementia

Turmeric/curcumin and dementia care significantly lessen its kind in India and Europe, which is due to turmeric and its primary component, curcumin, and their antioxidant benefits.

Helpful Herbs and Natural Aids

• Holy Basil (Ocimum tenuiflorum)
• Ginseng
• Ginkgo biloba
• Maca
• Brahmi (Bacopa monnieri)
• Green Tea (Camellia sinensis)
• Black Pepper corn extract (Piperine)
• Cachitozapot (from Nahuatl, meaning “sleep-sapote”) — a tropical fruiting tree also called casimiroa and Mexican apple. It contains a natural sedative and pain reliever.
• Verdolaga, Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)

Hope for Prevention and Relief

We can feel hopeful that natural integrative, personalized approaches could be the key to fighting this disease. In the meantime, it’s essential to take timely, simple steps to lower your risk of dementia now—before the disease has a chance to set in.

About 35% of dementia cases could be delayed or prevented if attention had been paid to modifiable risk factors, including early education, midlife hypertension, obesity, hearing problems, depression, diabetes, physical inactivity, smoking, and social isolation.