Dr. Noa Bergman explains what causes Alzheimer's, is there a way to prevent the disease, and how do you treat someone who has already had the disease?
Many studies point to a healthy lifestyle with a focus on a nutritious diet, regular exercise, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy habits as contributing to brain sharpness in old age.
But what about those who have already shown signs of Alzheimer's and other brain pathologies?
Will a healthy lifestyle still protect them from cognitive decline?
According to an observational study that examined the brains of 586 people during postmortems and compared the findings with up to 24 years of data on their lifestyles - the answer is yes.
"We found that the relationship between lifestyle and cognition was independent of the pathological burden of Alzheimer's disease, suggesting that a healthy lifestyle may provide cognitive benefits even to people who have begun to accumulate dementia-related pathologies in their brains," says the study's lead researcher, Claudine Dehna, assistant professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago.
In other words, the study found that despite the presence of Alzheimer's or another neurological disorder in those people tested in the study, positive changes they made in their lifestyle provided the brain with resilience against some of the most common causes of dementia," added Dr. Richard Isaacson, who led the study.
You really don't have to abstain.
Once a day (for women) or twice a day (for men) is considered harmless/Giphy
The five healthy habits that may bring about the change
For the study, autopsies were performed on 586 people living in retirement communities, assisted living for the elderly, and people who lived alone—all from the Chicago area.
The study was conducted between 1997 and 2022.
The participants, who lived to an average age of 91, underwent regular cognitive and physical examinations and filled out annual questionnaires about their lifestyles for more than two decades before their deaths.
People in the study were classified as having a low risk or healthy lifestyle if they scored high in five different categories: they didn't smoke;
they did moderate to vigorous physical activity at least 150 minutes per week;
They kept alcohol consumption at one drink a day for women and two for men;
And they regularly stimulated their brains by reading, visiting museums and playing games such as cards, checkers, crosswords or puzzles.
The fifth category measured the type of diet of those people, where the Mediterranean diet, which includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, seeds, nuts and a lot of olive oil, constituted a positive health marker for them.
The research team then compared the lifestyle data to various indicators found in their post-mortem brains, which indicate dementia or the onset of dementia.
Among other things, beta-amyloid levels and signs of brain damage in the blood vessels, or damage to the small blood vessels in the brain resulting from high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes, were tested.
It should be noted that not everyone who has signs of Alzheimer's or vascular dementia goes on to develop cognitive problems, but many do.
The secret?
rowing swimming
How to look and feel great, live healthy and lose weight?
In collaboration with TI SWIM
Crosswords and puzzles, especially in the older ages, will always help against cognitive problems/ShutterStock, pathdoc
The researchers also measured markers of three other brain diseases, including drug-resistant epilepsy, frontotemporal atrophy, and dementia, a neurological disorder that can cause problems with behavior, mood, movement and cognition.
The study, published this week in the journal JAMA Neurology, "is one of the first to harness brain pathology from post-mortem autopsies to investigate the relationship between modifiable risk factors and cognitive decline," wrote Prof. Hugh Lang and Prof. Kristin Yaffe in an accompanying editorial.
Yaffe, who was not involved in the research, is a professor of psychiatry, neurology and epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco and Yale Neuroscience Institute.
Lang, who was also not involved in the study, is an associate professor of psychiatry at the same institution.
For every one-point increase in the healthy lifestyle score used in the study, there was 0.120 units less amyloid beta load in the brain, and a 0.22 standard unit higher standard score in cognitive performance, as measured by a 30-item test that tested attention, memory, language and visual spatial skills.
The cognitive benefits remained regardless of the presence of any of the five types of neurological conditions found in the brains of those individuals after their death.
In fact, "a higher score of a healthy lifestyle was associated with better cognition, even after taking into account the presence of brain pathologies", the two researchers explained in their article.
In fact, a healthy lifestyle affected more than 88% of the cognitive score of each subject, even if in retrospect it turned out that brain pathologies were found in his body that teach about dementia or the beginning of it.
Only 12% of the cognitive score was affected by that person's physical condition.
As an observational study, direct cause and effect cannot be proven, Yaffe and Lang said.
However, the research is an important step in understanding the ways people can change their lives to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia.
More on the same topic:
dementia
Alzheimer's