We immediately pounced on this piece of news with much interest. You see, one of the worst fears anyone has about growing old is dementia. Take my Aunt Bertha or my Grandpa Collins for instance. Both now in their old age, couldn't even recall my name, much less engage in long conversations. It is not uncommon for the elderly to be besieged by problems with memory, speech, focus, etc.

Wikipedia defines dementia as the progressive decline in cognitive functions due to damage or disease in the brain beyond what might be expected from normal aging. Your regular medical book would tell you that there is no cure for dementia once you are afflicted with it. Doesn't it make aging a scary prospect?

Whatever happened to "aging gracefully?"

Nobody wants to be anyone's grumpy old man. The only solution to this is prevention. Hence, our heightened interest with anything that says it could stop brain shrinkage, dementia, and memory loss.

The study published this week in Neurology (you can find the abstract here), involved measuring the brain volume loss of 107 people aged 61 to 87, every year for five years. Those with greater brain volume decrease, were found to be those with lower vitamin B-12 levels.

Study team leader Anna Vogiatzoglou of Oxford University said, "Many factors that affect the brain health are thought to be out of our control, but this study suggests that simply adjusting our diets to consume more vitamin B-12 through eating meat, fish, fortified cereals or milk may be something we can easily adjust to prevent brain shrinkage and so perhaps save our memory."
Don't get too excited yet Baby-Boomers. This finding still needs further study, but many agree that it would not hurt to increase your vitamin B-12 intake.

However, for futher good news, you may cling on to the same experts' current prescription to prevent dementia: active lifestyle (mentally and physically). iMusic for one, offers a funky way to exercise your brain by keeping it sharp and focused for peak performance. The same experts say that it also appears that another means of reducing risk of dementia, is regular moderate consumption of alcohol (beer, wine, spirits).

Now, that last one deserves a toast from our bar habitues. Andy Capp should show this to Flo.