Dementia destroyed my father. Can I stop myself from getting it?
TV and comedy writer Ivor Baddiel, 62 takes up new hobbies –even painting – to try to dodge the disease that killed his dad.
In a large room above a cinema in Crouch End, north London, people ready their easels and paints. Everyone is relaxed except me. This is my first life-drawing class — as an artist, not a model, I hasten to add — and I’m not sure what to expect. (It certainly isn’t the model telling me, “This is the only time a woman will ever say, ‘Treat me like an object’.”)
An icebreaker — and good advice — but it didn’t help. I am hopeless at art and I hadn’t painted anything in almost 50 years. The thought of doing so again, aged 62, made me feel foolish. I tried not to panic as the model moved poses and I finally started to draw. Over the weeks of classes that followed it got a little easier — even if I still found drawing challenging and often frustrating.
As it happens, being this far outside my comfort zone was the point. I wasn’t there to become the next Picasso: I was there to try to protect my brain from dementia.
According to the Alzheimer’s Society, roughly a million people in the UK are living with dementia. It is now the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Our family, like many millions of others around the world, has a very personal connection to the illness. My father, Colin Baddiel, died in January 2022. He had been suffering with dementia for a long time — he was diagnosed in 2010 — and by the end was a mere husk of the funny, intelligent, piss-taking man I knew and loved.
His death was a relief but it also allowed me to remember him as the person he really was. As a family, we looked at photos of him playing football in his youth and on holiday with me and my brothers when we were kids, and watched videos of him with my children when they were little. Because when a person is suffering from dementia, the illness takes all of that away. In my father’s case it had been going on for so long that we sometimes forgot that the other person had ever existed. Heartbreakingly, his grandchildren will only remember him one way.
It’s little wonder, then, that I am keen to avoid the same fate. I try to eat well, I exercise, I don’t drink or smoke. I play games on my phone that purport to drastically reduce my mental age. According to one of them I’m currently nine years old.
I dare say none of this is doing any harm. But a while ago I listened to a podcast — ironically, I can’t remember which one — that argued that neuroplasticity continues long into old age and does not, as previous research argued, stop in your 20s. In simple terms, neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to form and reorganise synaptic connections. “Neuroplasticity basically refers to the idea that our brain is not a static thing,” says the cognitive neuroscientist Yael Benn. “It constantly changes, and it changes in response to what we do and the environment we encounter.”
While doing crosswords, sudoku and the like is fine, once you’ve mastered them you are effectively going over old neural pathways — in other words, doing nothing for developing this neuroplasticity. The only way to do that is to learn new skills. If we learn something new, that can bring about neurogenesis, which is the creation of new neurons in the brain. This can create new connections and pathways and prune older ones — neuroplasticity in action.
Can doing so help prevent or slow dementia? According to a 2024 report by the Lancet Commission titled Dementia prevention, intervention and care, there are 14 avoidable risk factors that might prevent or delay up to 45 per cent of dementia cases, including hypertension, obesity, smoking, physical inactivity, low social contact, excessive alcohol consumption and education. Aiming to live well and staying mentally sharp, therefore, appears to have a positive effect on your chances of developing dementia.
It is difficult to accurately measure the effects of education in later life and research is ongoing. However, The Lancet has previously reported on studies of midlife activities associated with better late-life cognition, including one that pointed to travel, social outings, playing music, art, physical activity, reading and speaking a second language.
“We need to do things that are outside our comfort zone,” says Michelle Reshef, founder of Dementia Prevention UK, a charity that provides tools to prevent dementia through lifestyle modification. “So, if you are good with words you should try a bit of numbers. If you are good with crocheting, you should move to bigger movements like dancing. If the new activity makes you stop, think and only then take action, then it’s a stimulating activity. If it’s something that is easy to do then it’s not a stimulating activity.”
My life-drawing classes are ticking the right boxes in terms of potential dementia prevention. I’ve also been having guitar lessons that are equally challenging — in fact, at times they’re exhausting. But it’s good exhaustion. There is also evidence, via research from The BrainHealth Project at the University of Texas, that doing brain training in a social context can add to the benefits. That’s your cue to follow suit — and sign up for your own version of a life-drawing class.
It’s also important we change the conversation around dementia prevention. Alzheimer’s Research UK reports that brain health is a stronger driver of health-conscious behaviour than the concept of dementia-risk reduction. It found that 69 per cent of UK adults believe they can influence their brain health, whereas only 34 per cent believe they can reduce their risk of developing dementia. It’s just a language shift but it could be vital.
I’m never going to be a great artist or guitarist, but I’ve definitely improved. Last summer I took grade 4 rock guitar and passed with merit — and I can draw a reasonable pair of buttocks now. It seems you can teach an old dog new tricks. And doing so could be very beneficial.
The Sunday Times
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