Key result
Addressing common vascular risk factors through an integrated, holistic life span approach may help mitigate or prevent major neurological and mental disorders.
Why the study?
Brain and mental health are often artificially separated despite sharing risk factors with stroke, heart disease, and dementia, presenting an opportunity for joint prevention through an integrated, whole-patient approach.
Advocates for an integrated approach to brain and mental health by addressing common, treatable vascular risk factors shared by stroke, heart disease, dementia, and mental disorders.
Shared risk factors across stroke, heart disease, and dementia support integrated brain-mental health strategies; leaves open causal roles for bipolar disorders.
The pandemic dramatized the close links among cognitive, mental, and social health; a change in one reflects others. This realization offers the opportunity to bridge the artificial separation of brain and mental health, as brain disorders have behavioral consequences and behavioral disorders affect the brain. The leading causes of mortality and disability, namely stroke, heart disease, and dementia, share the same risk and protective factors. It is emerging that bipolar disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, and some depressions share these risk factors, allowing their joint prevention through a holistic life span approach. We need to learn to focus on the whole patient, not simply on a dysfunctional organ or behavior to mitigate or prevent the major neurological and mental disorders by fostering an integrated approach to brain and mental health and addressing the common, treatable risk factors.
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Hachinski et al. (2023) conducted a review in Neurological and mental disorders. Vascular risk factors was evaluated. Addressing common vascular risk factors through an integrated, holistic life span approach may help mitigate or prevent major neurological and mental disorders.
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