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Provide access to quality education, ideally into early adult life, since the brain matures into one’s 20sof a health social gradient, where socioeconomically deprived people are less healthy. “Dementia is no exception,” he argues, “both in accessing diagnosis and care and for the lifetime risk of developing dementia. Early educational access and fewer environmental stressors, like excess noise and air pollution, can confer increased resistance to dementia later in life.
However, Dr Louise Hopper — an assistant psychologist at Dublin City University’s School of Psychology — dislikes Daly’s virtue-vice framework to illustrate lifestyle risk factors, telling The Irish Times that “at an individual level, research shows that a healthy and varied lifestyle benefits life expectancy generally, and protects against the risk of developing dementia, specifically encouraging healthy lifestyles at an individual level [and] demonstrates that individuals have some control...
Daly asserts that we have transposed our generally individualist and capitalist outlook of economic success to the domain of healththat contemporary public health focuses more on reducing lifestyle risk factors for chronic disease such as AD, thus embodying a tendency to moralise about health and behaviour and usurping medicine’s assumed neutrality.