Maintaining this simple habit helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease and boosts cognitive function.

The Barcelona Foundation Ace Alzheimer Center emphasizes the importance of the reading habit to stimulate and maintain cognitive function and thus prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, since reading is not only a pleasure for the mind, but also one of the most beneficial activities. for health, as it stimulates brain activity and strengthens neural connections.

In particular, reading helps train concentration, attention, memory and visualization, acting skills, as well as protective shield against cognitive decline.

For this reason, it is very important to encourage this habit from an early age and preserve throughout life. Apart from preserving our cognitive abilities, reading also reduces stress, which leads to neurological diseases such as headaches, and allows us to develop good sleep hygiene if practiced before bed.

The brain must remain active improve its functions and increase its response speed. For this reason, one of the greatest benefits of reading is that it helps improve our cognitive reservea key concept in this context that explains how the brain can better compensate and tolerate changes caused by certain pathologies, allowing people to maintain their cognitive abilities despite changes in the brain associated with age or neurodegenerative diseases.

Besides reading, level of education, lifestyle and leisure These are other factors that increase this reserve and provide greater protection against cognitive decline. Having a habit of frequent reading for more than five years and having at least completed primary education helps provide greater protection against this type of pathology.

Not only prevention

Finally, it is worth emphasizing the importance of reading. not only to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, but also to treat it and improve quality of life people who are already suffering from it. In particular, it helps them with speech and memory and makes a significant contribution to maintaining cognitive functions.

To this end, the head of the day care unit at the Alzheimer’s Center Ace in Barcelona, America Moreraadvises developing the habit of reading aloud among patients and emphasizes that “it is important to tailor reading to the needs and interests of each patient in order to make the activity attractive to them and even enable them to remember vital aspects or emotions.”