Lower Brain Blood Flow Raises Dementia Risk, Study Finds
A long-term study of nearly 4,800 middle-aged and older adults suggests that reduced blood flow to the brain may be an early warning sign for dementia. Researchers tracked participants for about seven years and found that those with lower cerebral perfusion, meaning less blood reaching brain tissue, faced a significantly higher risk of developing dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. The risk was especially pronounced in people who already had severe white matter hyperintensities, which are bright spots on brain scans indicating small vessel damage. Even among participants who did not develop dementia during the study, lower baseline blood flow was associated with faster cognitive decline over roughly six years. The findings suggest that maintaining healthy brain circulation could be key to preserving memory and thinking skills, and that blood flow measurements might help identify high-risk individuals before symptoms appear.
It's a strange day for me. I talked to my mother very briefly but her mind made it hard on her. I'm heartbroken for the day that may come when she doesn't remember us (her children, her grandkids,etc.)
Her mind has been affected by multiple ailments, so I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised, but hearing her decline in real time is devastating.
I'm hoping she still has good days in the future, and I'll treasure those when she does.
His rapid decline is obvious. Why not give it the attention it deserves?
Paul Waldman at Public Notice:
Anyone with an elderly parent or grandparent has seen how it goes: With the passage of years, rest becomes a struggle, as they sleep fitfully overnight, then nod off repeatedly over the course of the day.
This is President Trump’s pattern now. He goes on social media binges until the wee hours of the morning, sending out strings of angry messages while the rest of the country slumbers. Then when he finds himself sitting in a comfortable chair while others are momentarily the center of the action — in cabinet meetings, at a basketball game, even amid the spraying sweat and blood of a UFC fight on the White House lawn — his eyes close, his chin lowers, and he grabs a few moments of blissful slumber before returning to consciousness.
Trump’s habit of making frequent brief visits to dreamland is less a problem in itself than an illustration of something deeper; in fairness, anyone who had to listen to Lee Zeldin drone on about how great they are might put their head down for a nap, too. And most of the time, Trump does appear more spry than many 80-year-olds.
But only once before has America had a president this old — and that time, we held an extended and furious debate about whether age had rendered the octogenarian unable to do his job. By comparison, discussion of Trump’s age has been quiet and infrequent.
But it’s a subject we can no longer avoid. And if we’re going to confront it, we have to distinguish what is solely a matter of appearance from the things that really matter — exactly what we didn’t do when Joe Biden was the one growing old before our eyes.
More unhinged and disinhibited than ever
We are neither psychiatrist nor gerontologists and therefore make no specific diagnosis of Trump’s mental or physical state. But we are all doing what those with aging relatives do: watching the signs of increasing mental and physical infirmity, asking what’s normal and what might require intervention, and wondering when we ought to be worried.
Some of those signs have little or no effect on his job performance, like the gruesome bruising on his hand or the swollen ankles.
Even the sleeping, one could argue, doesn’t matter all that much — it’s not as though genuine business is being conducted at those cabinet meetings and he needs to stay sharp for it.
But disinhibition is often associated with certain kinds of dementia, and Trump seems less inhibited than ever — even for someone who wasn’t particularly inhibited to begin with.
[...]
Why not apply the Biden standard to Trump?
Trump is not aging in the same way Joe Biden did.
Biden looked increasingly frail in his last year in office — his voice became quieter and raspier, he acquired a shuffling gait, and he sometimes got a confused look on his face. Though he didn’t mix up names or dates any more often than Trump does today, Biden could sound tentative where Trump speaks loudly and with complete confidence, which gives the appearance of more vigor.
But more importantly for the question of presidential aging, there was never much evidence that Biden’s aging had affected his decision-making in problematic ways. That isn’t to say it wouldn’t have had he gone through another term in office, but there isn’t anything we could point to and say “a younger Biden would never have decided to do that.”
And it’s not as though reporters didn’t look hard enough. This is a key difference in how the two presidents have been treated: While there are occasional articles analyzing Trump’s aging, the mainstream media — especially the most important agenda-setting outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — treated Biden’s age as one of the most important stories in politics, a four-alarm fire that demanded every ounce of attention they could give it.
To cover the question, they assigned teams of journalists, then gave them the time to interview as many people as they could to explore the subject from every possible angle. What do people inside the White House say about Biden’s age? What do voters think about Biden’s age? How is Biden’s age being portrayed on the internet? What do doctors say about Biden’s age?
The fruit of that reporting was long articles with multiple bylines that were splashed on the front pages in story after lengthy story (see here, here, and here), from whence the discussion spread to every other outlet in every medium. They kept reporting on it even after the election was over; Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote an entire book about Biden’s age and “its cover-up,” which got a huge amount of coverage from those same news outlets when it was released in 2025.
None of this is to say it was ever wrong to ask when a president is too old; I myself wrote about Biden’s age many times, the first of which was in 2019. And one could argue that in Biden’s case there was a practical question at hand, of whether he would run for reelection in 2024 (a question that was effectively answered by his catastrophic performance in his first debate with Trump). Part of the difference, furthermore, is that reporters love to give Democrats advice and scold them when they don’t take it, while they treat Republicans more like a weather pattern they have no way to influence.
But while Trump’s voice may still be relatively strong, there are lots of reasons to worry about how his advancing age is affecting his judgment, and the consequences are profound. Would a younger Trump have literally threatened genocide (“A whole civilization will die tonight”) against a people he claimed to be trying to help, or picked a fight with the Pope, then posted an AI image of himself as Jesus?
Would a younger Trump with his political skills and understanding of the attention economy spend so much time drawing attention to the catastrophe of his reflecting pool renovation? Would a younger and less addled Trump have decided that invading Iran was a great idea, and taken so long to get out?
Donald Trump’s decline isn’t given the same scrutiny as Joe Biden in the media.
Did you know nearly 45% of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed? This shows how important your daily habits are. Skipping three daily habits is essential for a low risk of dementia. These simple actions can greatly reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline.
Ignoring these habits might seem harmless, but they’re crucial for brain health. You can control your cognitive future…
I will continue to stay away from LLMs and reliance on AI; I already have enough brain damage from years of crippling depression, mental health crises, and drug use. But sure, I bet it did make your email sound...different.
"advocate for yourself, ask people to slow down, include why if you want to. Let yourself speak slower. If they aren't willing to be patient, or they are awful to you, they aren't worth your time anyway."
I couldn’t shake the question: why do sharp people start losing words and names as they age, even without a disease? The answer I kept circling back to was the pineal gland. It’s this tiny, pinecone-shaped structure in the brain that produces melatonin. Over time, it can calcify — often from fluoride in water and food — and essentially stop working.
When that happens, the brain loses its nightly antioxidant flush. Melatonin isn’t just for sleep; it’s a cleaner. Without it, oxidative stress builds, and memory centers suffer. The interesting part is that certain ingredients — like tamarind (a fluoride binder), spirulina (a melatonin precursor), and bacopa (a memory pathway strengthener) — have actual studies behind them for supporting this process.
I’m not jumping on any hype train. The science is still evolving, and not every claim out there checks out. But the core idea that we can support our brain’s natural protective systems, rather than just treating symptoms, feels worth exploring.
I documented a more detailed breakdown here for those who want to read further:
