These findings may have wide implications for preventive healthcare. If an individual adopts an active lifestyle in youth, at midlife, this may increase their probability of enjoying both physically and cognitively vital years later in life.

It seems that physical activity had an even more pronounced effect among those with the susceptibility gene apoe4, the most important risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

It may promote brain plasticity by a direct effect on the brain.

This is the first study to show this long-term relation between physical activity and dementia later in life.

any other healthcare providers or other entities.

Great physicians and nurses, skilled, caring and unparalleled in their training, intervened in my life and probably saved it. I was lucky but other Americans are not. It is time to speak again and stand again for the ideal that in the richest nation ever on this planet, it is wrong for 41 million Americans, most of them in working families, to worry at night and wake up in the morning without the basic protection of health insurance.