It is no secret that following a healthy diet and exercising regularly are beneficial for your health, as they reduce the risk of obesity and the diseases associated with it. Now, new research further suggests that these lifestyle factors weigh heavily in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The work has been published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (USA) found that people with mild memory problems who followed a Mediterranean diet and regularly engaged in mild physical exercise were less likely to experience an accumulation of tau and beta protein -amyloid in the brain , key in Alzheimer’s.
This is the first study to show how these factors affect the accumulation of Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the brains of people with mild memory problems : “The fact that we could detect this influence of lifestyle at the molecular level before the start of severe memory problems we were surprised, ”said David Merrill, study leader.
For the experiment, the scientists involved 44 adults between 40 and 85 years of age , of whom 24 had subjective memory impairment and 20 mild cognitive impairment; none of the participants had been diagnosed with dementia. All the participants underwent an analysis of their body mass, physical activity, a questionnaire about their diet and a new type of examination that measures the levels of beta-amyloid plaques and tau proteins in the brain.
The researchers found that individuals with healthy body mass, who followed a Mediterranean diet and engaged in some form of exercise, had lower levels of plaques and clumps in the brain than subjects who did not conform to this lifestyle.
” The study reinforces the importance of living a healthy life to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, even before the development of clinically significant dementia ,” says Merrill.
