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Add another reason to your laundry list of motivations to get fit and eat right: A healthy body will likely keep dementia and Alzheimer's at bay, a group of scientists say.

The team of scientists and doctors from the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and New Mexico VA Health Care Systems are trying to make a connection between hypertension and diabetes and the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Hypertension and diabetes both damage white matter in the front of the brain. White matter is the connecting fiber between the thinking lobes of gray matter. It's linked to memory and the processing of complex information, said Cheryl Aine, a researcher at UNM.

White matter is also damaged in people who have dementia and Alzheimer's, Aine said.

"What we want to do is establish what is healthy aging," Aine said. "We want to know what we can expect to lose as a function of aging alone, as opposed to what happens with all these other disease processes going on."

Past studies on aging grouped together healthy elderly and those with the two diseases. That means data from them could be skewed to show exaggerated memory loss and thinking problems in people over 65, said Janice Knoefel, a physician in geriatrics and extended care at the VA.

"When you see somebody who's in their mid-90s, and they drive to the office, they're in the room and they look like they're 65, you can see there's really something to it," Knoefel said.

In the study, researchers would separate healthy individuals over 65 from those with hypertension and diabetes and look for differences in white matter in the brain.

If a connection is found linking the diseases, it probably won't help people who already have Alzheimer's and dementia, but it could help prevent them in a new generation, Aine said.

"We have to tease all these things out," Aine said.

In the meantime, diet and exercise certainly won't hurt anybody who is concerned about developing the diseases, Knoefel said.

"The best advice we can give is to adjust your lifestyle to minimize your risk of getting chronic diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes," Knoefel said. "Don't smoke, stay at a moderate weight, get lots of exercise, eat healthy food."

It's also important to exercise your brain with games like sudoku, cards or even social activities, she added.

"Clearly, such cognitive activity is not going to prevent the pathology of Alzheimer's, but it may delay the onset of symptoms," Knoefel said. "Something about the mental and physical activity seems to maintain good cognitive health - and we're still trying to figure out why."