Your thinking skills may be at risk of declining in midlife if you smoke or have high blood pressure or diabetes, a new study suggests.
Heart disease risk factors — especially high blood pressure and diabetes — have become more common in midlife, the study authors noted.
“We found those two risk factors, as well as smoking, are associated with higher odds of having accelerated cognitive [mental] decline, even over just a short span of five years,” said lead author Dr. Kristine Yaffe. She’s a professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco.
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