Welcome back to CTV News. Non-traditional risk factors combined to predict Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Those are some of the findings of a new study released today. Dr. Kenneth Rockwood and his colleagues at the Geriatric Medicine Research Unit at Dalhousie University published the report. And Dr. Rockwood joins us now. Thanks for coming in. A very fascinating day in your field of studies. Good to see you. Big day. Thanks very much. Just some basic background stuff. A lot of people confuse the two. The differences between Alzheimer's and dementia are what? Sure. Dementia is the health problem in which people's memory and thinking is so severely affected that it interferes with how they live their daily lives. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, after that strokes. And typically in our country in North America, who are the people that are usually impacted by Alzheimer's and dementia? Most of people over the age of 65, actually, most people over the age of 80. So it's a disorder which is very uncommon under the age of 65, but affects between one and two and one and three people over the age of 85. And where are we now in Canada? On the rise? Is it the... Definitely on the rise. So it's a big, big problem because the population is aging. And the prevalence of dementia is going up in lockstep with the aging of the population. All right. So let's get to the study. Non-traditional factors. Explain that. But if you... Well, what does that mean? So for a long time, it was thought that Alzheimer's was a neurodegenerative disorder and there's nothing in particular that gave rise to it. And then over the years, people started to look at that again. So we've always known that age is an important risk factor. And then it turned out that low education was an important risk factor. And then it turned out that having a family history in which there was Down syndrome was a risk factor. In the 1990s, we spent a lot of time understanding that vascular risk factors, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, things like that, were risks... Not just for stroke, but the risk for Alzheimer's themselves. And then over time, the number of things that are individually shown to be a risk for Alzheimer's has grown. My colleagues and I were really interested in that and we said, the list of giving me so big right now is that these illnesses in themselves are giving rise to a specific problem or is the problem more not with the risk factors, but how in people who have genetic predisposition or who have whatever other problem it is, the brain is actually fighting back in a way that does more harm than good. So we said, what if we push this? What if we take things which are not known in any way to be risks for Alzheimer's better, somehow not good for you, even if it's a low level of things, things like sinusitis, or fallen arches, or wearing dentures? I think you would never think of obviously. You would never think of, and when we looked at them one at a time, they were not risks for Alzheimer's. But if you start to add up all these little tiny things, this turned out to be actually a powerful risk for Alzheimer's. So the point is not that dentures are bad for you, the point is that things that accumulate, which individually may be bad for you and not necessarily bad for the brain, things will accumulate to become a risk for Alzheimer's. So when you take this information that you've gathered, these conclusions you've reached, and you take it at first spin, and you apply it to the science. What difference can it make down the road? Do you know yet, is there an application that will work here? You can take this and make changes in the world around us? So I think there's a couple of things. I think from the message we want the general public to understand is maintaining good health is not just good. It doesn't just give you good health, but it lowers the risk of late life dementia. That's the thing for people to understand. When people ask, how should I best do that? It's physical exercise is the way that you have accumulation of small good things, and they add up to dramatically lower the risk for Alzheimer's. This is flipping on the other side. This says that an accumulation of small bad things will increase the risk. I think really that message is more for the scientific community, and it's drawing our attention with fact that because the risk factors have virtually nothing in common, maybe we should pay less attention to that and more attention to how the brain repairs itself. And it may be that what the cause of Alzheimer's disease is, is not these risks, but it's a faulty repair mechanism. It's a repair mechanism that some people does more harm than good. So from the scientific community, we're trying to get up to two messages. One is pay attention to the nature of the abrum repair response, and the other one is pay attention to how small things add up. Tell me about the sample and the time frame of the study. How many people, how long? So this was a mountain of work. Actually what we did was we re-analyzed all of the data on risk factors from the Canadian study of health and aging. That study was carried up between 1991 and 2001, and the data were analyzed for five years afterwards. So this was a conference of rethink of that database. That database has been very influential in the world, and I was very proud to part of that study in which we looked at things like high blood pressure and cholesterol, and those are things as risks. They helped to establish the current understanding. So it was worth a lot of money to go back to that database which had been so informative and say, what if we started it over, what if we started it fresh, and what if we threw everything that we think we know now, and took these things which in themselves can't plausibly individually be related to the risk of Alzheimer's. So we use that as a strategy to draw attention, not to these risk factors, but to the fact that there must be something else going on, which is this abrum repair response, or at least that's what we hypothesize. You know, you're onto something big when you do a ton of media, and you were telling me today, you've been talking to reporters all day long, New York Times, before you came into the New York Times CNN, USA Today, it's been a huge response. Well, there's a language to that where I'm coming from. What does that tell you that the world is so anxious to buy into your study this quickly and get this information out there? It must be heartening for you to have so many people engaged, interested in what you're finding, and show us. Yes, the biggest media day for me. I think it's showing us two things. Number one is, I think there's an appetite for people to understand that good general health is good for you in the long term as well. I think there's been a fair amount of interest from the scientific community, though, in the idea that this is a new way to think about Alzheimer's. This is focusing us on the repair process, not the insult. We can find the study, is it an online study? Is it in the magazine? Does someone want to go see it, read more about it? How can they do that? So, it's in the journal Neurology, and it will be online as a four o'clock today. Fantastic. It's a fascinating find, a fascinating subject, and one, of course, I touch this so many Canadians, so many Maritimeers, and so many people in North America. Kenneth Rock, we're good to see you. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for the support. That's good to have you in here. And CTV News continues after this.