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Cases of Alzheimer patients are starting to show up in the U.S. with people in their forties and fifties! How can that be? Isn’t that for people in their 70’s or older? Recent studies done by Dr. Nima Kivipelto and his colleagues from the University of Kuopio in Finland suggest that the long-term effects of stress may be the biggest cause of Alzheimer’s. It is believed that the stress hormone, cortisol, kills off brain cells when it enters the brain. Kivipelto’s research found that patients with both high blood pressure and high cortisol levels were more than three times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as patients without these symptoms. If you have either high cortisol levels or high blood pressure, your risk is twice as high. Researchers at the University of California- Irvine say that stress hormones can rapidly accelerate the formation of the brain lesions that cause Alzheimer’s. [Read more…] about Stress and Alzheimer’s Disease