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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is On Point. I'm Megna Chakra-Bardi, and we're at the final episode of Brainwaves.

It's our special week looking at the wonderful mystery that is the human brain.

And we're going to wrap up the week today with the question that's probably the most pertinent to us all.

How do you keep your brain healthy, especially as we age?

Now, the truth is, there's no one magic formula that works for every single person.

However, the overall approach actually is

quite simple. So then maybe the deeper question for Americans might be, why is keeping our brains

healthy getting harder? For example, take dementia. The lifetime dementia risk for American men is as high as 14%.

For women, it's much higher, almost 25%.

That's one and four American women.

Now, those numbers are from the National Institutes of Health.

By the way, NIH also found in a January 2025 study that for all Americans, above the age of 55,

the risk of developing dementia in a person's lifetime has risen to 42 percent.

But as they always do, those broad and aggregate numbers are actually hiding something,

because the risk is not evenly spread across the United States.

There are stark regional differences in this country.

So if you live in the southeastern U.S., the incidence of dementia is 25% higher than what we see in the mid-Atlantic.

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