In this article, we’re bringing you advice from the 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care - a group of experts who have combed through massive amounts of previous research collected over decades to highlight 14 risk factors associated with dementia. The good news? Those 14 factors are things that can be modified. So making lifestyle changes around the factors identified here can help improve brain health, and potentially keep people that have the gene for Huntington’s disease (HD) healthy for longer.
Dementia vs HD
While HD and dementia may have different root causes, underlying factors that are beneficial for one will be beneficial for the other. Dementia is a general term for a reduced cognitive ability - the ability to think, remember, and reason.
A reduction in cognition is only one component of HD, which is caused by an inherited expansion of the genetic code in the huntingtin (HTT) gene. HD also affects a person’s mood and has a movement component similar to Parkinson’s disease, called chorea.