Human Growth and Development / Unit 15 HGD 2154 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Modifiable Dementia Risk
The idea
Livingston and colleagues estimated that about forty percent of dementia cases are associated with potentially modifiable risk factors. Across life these include less education in early life; hearing loss, traumatic brain injury, hypertension, heavy drinking and obesity in midlife; and smoking, depression, social isolation, physical inactivity, air pollution and diabetes in later life. Hearing loss is the largest single factor.
In practice
A town where many adults have untreated hearing loss: removing it would change the town's dementia numbers, but not guarantee any one resident's outcome.
Where people slip
The percentages are population attributable fractions: the share of cases in a population linked to each factor, not the reduction in any individual's risk from changing it. Saying that not smoking cuts your personal risk by five percent misreads them. Whether hearing loss causes dementia or signals it remains unresolved.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for Human Growth and Development