Why modern life is making dementia in your 40s more likely | Colin Pritchard

From background radiation to chemicals in the food chain, environmental changes are contributing to a rapid global rise in neurological disease

My interest in neurological disease was triggered by a second friend dying of motor neurone disease (MND), which in purely statistical terms was exceptional. It is suggested there is an incidence of about one in 50,000 who are affected by MND and most die. No one knows 50,000 people, so was it a statistical fluke?

This raised the question of whether there were increases not only in MND, but in neurological disorders as a whole, including the dementias. Using World Health Organisation mortality data, which - while not perfect - is the best information available as it is collated in a standard and uniform way, myself and colleagues at the faculty of health and social sciences at Bournemouth University set out to investigate this.

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