A study by doctors at the University of New York, in the United States, revealed that using the internet regularly in the range between 50 and 65 years old can halve the risk of developing dementia.
The research followed the cognitive progress of 18,154 adults in this age group and was published in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society this Wednesday (3/5).
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“Using the Internet can help develop and maintain cognitive reserve, which in turn can offset brain aging and reduce the risk of dementia,” said one of the study’s authors, physician and sociologist Virginia W. Chang, in an announcement. the press.
The investigators followed the patients for eight years, monitoring them every two years with interviews and looking for signs of dementia on stress tests and imaging tests.
Doctors found that although the group of people who used the internet was larger, with 10,333 participants, only 224 of them were diagnosed with dementia. Among the 7,821 volunteers who did not use the internet, 959 developed the disease.
Excess is also dangerous
According to the researchers, the risk reduction graph is U-shaped. This means that both ignoring and using the internet excessively can be dangerous. The ideal period of daily use would be a maximum of two hours a day.
People who never used the internet were 67% more likely to have dementia than those who used it moderately. Those who worked more than eight hours a day, however, also had even higher levels of the disease than the group without internet access.
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“The longer intervals seem worrying, but we lack a larger database of people to be able to evaluate it”, they point out in the study.
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The post Using the internet at 50 reduces the risk of dementia by half, says a study first appeared on Metropolis.