1. State your health outcome of interest. (It could be the one you used for week #2 or another one.) Pick two key behaviors that are important factors leading to your health outcome. Explain the importance of these behaviors either for etiology, prevention, or intervention. (If none of the behaviors in the readings are important for your health outcome, suggest another behavior that is.)
Outcome of interest: Risk of Dementia
Behavior 1: Poor social engagement and social withdraw. Poor social engagement has been associated with a higher risk of MCI or dementia, some studies has shown that social integration delays memory loss. These strong studies clearly indicate the importance of social relations in shaping cognitive decline. Social integration may help to preserve memory through several mechanisms. One possible mechanism is physical health: research strongly implicates vascular conditions such as diabetes, unmanaged hypertension, and stroke in the etiology of dementia. Social integration may reduce the onset of such conditions and help to ameliorate their consequences through direct neuro-hormonal pathways and behavioral modifications.
Behavior 2: Low physical activity. There is clear evidence that Low physical activity increase the risk of several NTCD, including dementia. Rapidly growing literature strongly suggests that exercise, specifically aerobic exercise, may attenuate cognitive impairment and reduce dementia risk. Mecanism that has been suggested in different studies explain that aerobic exercise is associated with significantly larger hippocampal volumes and better spatial memory and attenuation of age-related gray matter volume loss. Other studies has shown that brain cognitive networks studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging display improved connectivity after 6 to 12 months of exercise. 2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach. It is been argue that in neurodegenerative diseases ,like dementia, behaviors usually make a higher impact during early or middle life so it will be interesting to figure out what are the main factors that influence in a poor social engagement and social withdraw, this of course will have to take in considerations or control for race, education, urban vs rural etc. 3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not? I think there are very well establish behaviors that may drive or increase the risk of develop certain outcomes, so in my opinion those behaviors in that context don’t need further study. So research could be better focus in how to prevent
2. Describe how you would study the role of one of the behaviors described for question #1 and your health outcome of interest. Incorporate a social factor (e.g. race/ethnicity, social exclusion, stress) in the study approach. It is been argue that in neurodegenerative diseases ,like dementia, behaviors usually make a higher impact during early or middle life so it will be interesting to figure out what are the main factors that influence in a poor social engagement and social withdraw, this of course will have to take in considerations or control for race, education, urban vs rural etc. 3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not? I think there are very well establish behaviors that may drive or increase the risk of develop certain outcomes, so in my opinion, those behaviors in that context don’t need further study. So research could be better focus in how to prevent
3. If key health behaviors (e.g. smoking, exercise, nutritious diet) are strongly influenced by neighborhood, income, and/or education, do we need to continue to study how these behaviors influence health outcomes? Why or why not? I think there are very well establish behaviors that may drive or increase the risk of develop certain outcomes, so in my opinion those behaviors in that context don’t need further study. So research could be better focus in how to prevent