There’s good news for older Americans at high-risk of developing dementia: simple steps to stay mentally and physically active improved thinking and helped keep Alzheimer’s disease at bay. And it didn’t take long.
Lifestyle changes including exercise, a better diet, and more mental and social activity yielded significant protection within two years, according to a large clinical trial published Monday. To qualify for the study, participants had to have various risk factors for brain decline, like consuming a poor diet and not exercising regularly. Others had a gene mutation tied to Alzheimer’s disease.
While brain function starts to worsen in a person’s sixties, the results indicate that switching up one’s routine even later in life can stall the onset of dementia. Making such changes appeared to slow the cognitive aging clock by one to two years, said Laura Baker, a professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest University of Medicine and one of the study leaders.
The key takeaways are to “move more, sit less, add color to your plate, learn something new, and stay connected,” Baker said at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Toronto, where the results were presented. “Challenge yourself to do this on a regular basis.”
The findings were simultaneously published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk, known as Pointer, is the largest lifestyle intervention trial for Alzheimer’s disease completed in the U.S. It included more than 2,000 adults between the ages of 60 and 79 in structured and self-guided intervention groups.
Cognitive function improved in both, but those getting structured support had a significantly greater benefit than those in the self-guided group.
The program recommended cardiovascular exercise for 30 minutes, four days a week, and a low-salt diet with a focus on brain-healthy foods like dark leafy greens, berries, whole grains and coldwater fish. Participants in the structured group completed “brain training” computer games three times a week.
The structured group had 38 meetings with their peers over the two-year study to set goals and keep others accountable. The self-guided group met much less often — six times over the two years — but received the same information.
The POINTER trial replicated the 2015 landmark FINGER study, or Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment, to assess whether those findings applied to the larger and often less healthy US population.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
