Study Finds These Dietary Habits Can Help If You’re at Risk of Alzheimer’s

When it comes to dementia risk, certain factors, such as genetics, are out of your control. However, plenty of research suggests lifestyle behaviors — things you can change — may help improve your chances of staying sharp as you age. In a new study, people with an elevated risk of dementia were less likely to develop the condition if they followed a healthy dietary pattern, particularly a less inflammatory one.

For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden followed nearly 1,900 adults aged 60-plus for 15 years, 240 of whom developed dementia during this time. Participants had their blood tested for proteins that indicate dementia- and Alzheimer’s-related brain changes (known as biomarkers) and also completed questionnaires about their eating habits on several occasions. The researchers then scored the quality of their diets based on three metrics.

• Alternate Mediterranean Diet (AMED), which measures how closely a diet aligns with Mediterranean-diet pillars, such as eating ample plants and fish and limiting red meat
• Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), which rates a diet based on its inclusion of foods that lower chronic disease risk and exclusion of items that raise it
• Reversed Empirical Dietary Inflammatory Index (rEDII), which captures the inflammatory potential of a diet by assigning weighted scores to certain foods and drinks based on their ties to blood markers of inflammation

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.