The MIND Diet, a 15-component dietary strategy designed for the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease, was shown in a recent longitudinal study to have a protective effect against memory and thinking problems, as measured by cognitive tests.
 
According to the study, which appears in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, participants were protected from declines in cognitive function even when they developed amyloid plaques and tangles, protein deposits which are associated with cognitive function declines and Alzheimer’s disease dementia.
 
Researchers from Rush University Medical Center tracked the health outcomes of 569 decedent participants of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center’s ongoing Memory and Aging Project, which began in 1997. The participants at study baseline who were recruited had no mild cognitive impairment, and were all above the age of 65.
 
The researchers tracked adherence to the MIND Diet, which consists of a daily regimen of three whole grain servings, a green leafy vegetable and one other vegetable, a glass of wine, nuts, beans, poultry, berries, and fish, with strong limitations on butter, red meat, cheese, pastries, sweets, and fried or fast food. Food frequency questionnaires, which were given to the participants once yearly beginning in 2004, were used to assess how well the participants followed this diet throughout their lives, and the investigators used these adherence scores to break the participant pool down into subgroups.
 
Participants were significantly less likely to have scores indicative of cognitive impairment if they adhered more strictly to the MIND diet throughout their lives. Those with the highest MIND scores on average, from the start of the study until the participant’s death, were used to limit measurement error.
 
“We found that a higher MIND diet score was associated with better memory and thinking skills independently of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and other common age-related brain pathologies,” Klodian Dhana, MD, PhD, lead author of the study and assistant professor in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Rush Medical College, said.
 
Interestingly, the authors noted that even among participants who had plagues and tangles in their brains at levels which would suggest Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, the MIND diet still had a protective effect on cognitive function. This suggests that dietary factors could contribute to cognitive resilience in the elderly, even if they have brain pathology indicative of a disease state, the researchers concluded.
 
“Some people have enough plaques and tangles in their brains to have a postmortem diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, but they do not develop clinical dementia in their lifetime,” Dhana said. “Some have the ability to maintain cognitive function despite the accumulation of these pathologies in the brain, and our study suggests that the MIND diet is associated with better cognitive functions independently of brain pathologies related to Alzheimer’s disease.”