Smiling Does not Cure Dementia
Junk science says smiling is the new dementia cure. One M.D. begs to differ and I thought I would share his Email to me and others on the subject.
A little background:
A study, published in Neurology, 506 older people who were not suffering from dementia were asked about their personality traits and life attitudes. The research came to the conclusion that people who were not socially active, but were calm and relaxed had one half the risk of developing dementia. It was also one half lower for persons who were more social and of a relaxed demeanor compared to those who were outgoing and given to stress.
and now here is the doctor’s email.
Dear Friend,
Grasping at straws. Giving false hope. Call it what you will, mainstream medicine must really be desperate when it comes finding a cure for dementia. Now they’re subscribing to the age-old adage: When all else fails, put on a happy face.
Well, there’s nothing happy about this little bit of junk research they call science. According to a new study, researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm are suggesting that people who are sociable and easygoing are less likely to develop dementia. Give me a break.
According to study author Hui-Xin Wang, "Older people who are active, outgoing, and relaxed may be less likely to develop dementia." And how did they reach this momentous discovery? Through a questionnaire, of course.
The researchers questioned more than 500 elderly test subjects about their personality, the way they react to stress, and their degree of sociability. Over the course of the six-year study, 144 of the people in the study had developed dementia of one form or another. Even if the subjects didn’t have active social lives, the easygoing people were 50 percent less like to develop dementia than the more neurotic patients. And the easygoing social butterflies? They were also half as likely to be clouded by dementia.
This study has so many flaws, I don’t even know where to start. Heck, even the lead researcher acknowledged that the study was full of holes! "The main limitation of the current study is that personality was assessed only at one occasion," he said. "Although personality traits are generally stable throughout the life course, individual differences in late adulthood have been observed."
I give Wang credit for coming clean, but it seems clear to me that the methodology of this study seems fairly absurd. For starters, how do you arrive at an empirical definition of "easygoing" for a medical study? Not to mention that the other factors that could play a role in the development of dementia were not factored into the research. How you could draw useable conclusions based on this kind of research is beyond me.
William H. Thies, the Alzheimer’s Association chief medical and scientific officer, said, "What we really need are enough resources to find modifiable risk factors that we can change so that we reduce the risk of the disease and we don’t see as much of it occurring."
I hardly think that telling patients to "cheer up" is a legitimate "modifiable risk factor."
William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.
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