The closer you follow a Mediterranean Diet, the lower your risk of dementia even if you are genetically prone to dementia according to 9-year data for 60,298 participants in the prospective UK Biobank study.
High adherence, though not moderate or low adherence, was associated with the lowest dementia risk, even in those with the APOE4 genotype, the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's.
Researchers state:
- Diet is an important modifiable risk factor for dementia that could be targeted for disease prevention and risk reduction.
- A healthy diet might also mitigate individual genetic risk for dementia.
- Healthier dietary patterns, especially the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), have been proposed as a strategy to reduce dementia risk.
- We demonstrated that higher adherence to the MedDiet is associated with lower risk of incident all-cause dementia.
- Specifically, participants with the highest MedDiet adherence had 23% lower risk of developing dementia in comparison with those with the lowest level of adherence.
Reference
Shannon, Oliver, et al. "Mediterranean diet adherence is associated with lower dementia risk, independent of genetic predisposition: Findings from the UK Biobank prospective cohort study." BMC Medicine (2023). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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