Lifestyle Changes Are No Guarantee Against Alzheimer's

There is not enough evidence to say that improving your lifestyle can protect you against Alzheimer's disease, a new review finds. The report is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A group put together by the National Institutes of Health looked at 165 studies to see if lifestyle, diet, medical factors or medications, socioeconomic status, behavioral factors, environmental factors,and genetics may help prevent the mind-robbing condition.

Although biological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors may contribute to the delay or prevention of cognitive decline, the review authors couldn't draw any firm conclusions about an association between modifiable risk factors and cognitive decline or Alzheimer's disease.

However, one expert doesn't belive the report represents all that is known about Alzheimer's.

"I found the report to be overly pessimistic and sometimes mistaken in their conclusions, which are largely drawn from epidemiology, which is almost always inherently inconclusive," says Greg M. Cole, PhD, associate director of the Alzheimer's Center at the UCLA.

The real problem is that everything scientists know suggests that intervention needs to occur before cognitive deficits begin to show themselves, Cole notes. Unfortunately, there aren't enough clinical trials underway to find definitive answers before aging baby boomers will begin to be ravaged by the disease, he added.

The panel found that although lifestyle factors, such as eating a Mediterranean diet, consuming omega-3 fatty acids, being physically active, and engaging in leisure activities, were associated with a lower risk of cognitive decline, the current evidence is "too weak to justify strongly recommending them to patients."

In addition, while factors such as the gene marker APOEe4, the metabolic syndrome (which includes risk factors such as obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure), and depression were associated with a higher risk of cognitive decline, again the evidence was not convincing, the panel found.

Moreover, "there is insufficient evidence to support the use of pharmaceutical agents or dietary supplements to prevent cognitive decline or Alzheimer's disease," the panel wrote.

There was strong evidence that smokers or people with diabetes do have an increased risk for cognitive decline, they noted.

The panel did note that there is a lot of promising research on medication, diet, exercise and keeping mentally active as ways of slowing or preventing cognitive decline.

"What you do to stop from getting the disease may vary with the nature of your risk," Cole said. "This is common sense but not always built into the thinking of clinical trial design. These are some of the things that we need to change. Otherwise, we may end up with more or less the same expert panel report 10 years from now."

Source: Brigham and Women's Hospital