Do you have diabetes? According to new research, this diet can help reduce your risk of dementia by 31%

A new study highlights the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet in reducing the risk of dementia, even in people with pre-existing conditions.

Reviewed by Dietitian Jessica Ball, MS, RDReviewed by Dietitian Jessica Ball, MS, RD

When you are injured or sick, certain cells and hormones in your body work to heal. This is done by creating an inflammatory response called acute inflammation, which is a necessary step in recovery from illness and healing of a wound or injury. An example of this is when you sprain your ankle and it swells up – although in other cases the inflammation is not as obvious and we often don’t see it. During healing, the inflammation gradually dissipates.

Related: Understanding Acute and Chronic Inflammation: What’s Healthy and What’s Harmful?

But there’s another type of inflammation—chronic inflammation—that tends to stick around and hang around in your body like an annoying roommate you can’t get rid of. This type of inflammation can take a toll on your body and has been linked to many chronic diseases, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke (to name a few).

These particular conditions—heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, which are considered cardiometabolic diseases—are in turn associated with an increased risk of dementia. This also means that chronic inflammation is linked to dementia.

Diet can also play a big role in fanning the flames of inflammation. For example, what researchers consider a typical Western diet, characterized by high consumption of red meat, high-fat dairy products, refined grains and highly processed foods, has been associated with higher inflammatory markers in the body. On the other hand, eating patterns characterized by higher amounts of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish and legumes, such as the Mediterranean diet, have been associated with lower inflammatory markers.

Although researchers understand that there is a link between inflammation, cardiometabolic disease, and dementia, and evidence suggests that there is a link between inflammatory foods and increased inflammation in the body, they still have unanswered questions. For example, if people with cardiometabolic disease follow an anti-inflammatory diet, could they reduce their risk of dementia despite having dementia risk factors?

Scientists tried to answer this question in a new study published on August 12, 2024 JAMA network open. Let’s dive in.

How was this study conducted and what did they find?

Participants in this study were UK Biobank, an ongoing longitudinal study of adults aged 40-70 across the UK. About half of 84,342 people from the Biobank, with an average age of 64, participated in this study. female.

Other demographic information collected included race and ethnicity, height and weight, blood pressure, smoking status, and physical activity. The researchers also looked at the participants’ blood to detect the presence or absence of a gene that indicates a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease.

Dietary information was collected through a 24-hour dietary assessment administered at baseline (the beginning of the study) and up to four additional times over 18 months. The assessments measured consumption of 206 foods and 32 beverages. From these estimates, energy and nutrient intakes were calculated, as was a dietary inflammatory index (DII) score. The DII has been validated in previous studies and assigns a food an inflammatory effect score based on what is currently known about the inflammatory response to that food. Anti-inflammatory foods get a negative number, while foods that tend to be anti-inflammatory get a positive number. This is one estimate where the lower number is more favorable.

A subset of 8,917 participants who did not have any neurological disease at the time also underwent an MRI of the brain so the researchers could detect changes in the brain during the study period. This is important because dementia is all about the brain.

After collecting all the data and performing numerous statistical analyses, including after adjusting for confounding variables such as demographics, the results were in.

The risk of dementia was 31% lower in people with cardiometabolic disease who ate an anti-inflammatory diet compared to people without cardiometabolic disease who ate an anti-inflammatory diet.

And that’s not all. Remember the brain MRI? Participants who followed the anti-inflammatory diet had significantly greater gray matter volume in their brains, indicating less neurodegeneration, and significantly less white matter hyperintensity, indicating less vascular injury.

The researchers say these brain findings fit into the framework of inflammation, a theory that aging and disease development in older people is due to a disruption in the normal balance of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory processes as we age. In other words, aging comes down to inflammation and its presence or absence.

Related: These Healthy Lifestyle Factors May Help Reduce Risk of Early Dementia, New Study

How does it work in real life?

One of the conclusions of these researchers notes that their results emphasize that diet is important and a modifiable factor in disease prevention. This means that modifiable behaviors, such as food choices, can affect disease risk even despite pre-existing conditions (such as heart disease, diabetes, and stroke) that put you at higher risk for other diseases (in this case, dementia).

Although aging is inevitable, the rate at which it ages can be at least partially under your control. Our Healthy Aging Diet Center has a number of articles on healthy aging and brain health. For example, we have recipes and information about the MIND diet. It’s a diet that combines elements of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, the latter of which is a hypertension diet that helps prevent or slow neurodegenerative delay.

We’ve also reported how sitting too much can speed up aging, how sleep affects aging, and what exercises can slow aging. And then there’s stress, which accelerates the aging process and can impair cognitive function. Stress can also affect sleep and eating, which can affect exercise – and so the vicious cycle goes.

Bottom line

This study suggests that people with cardiometabolic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and/or stroke had a 31% reduced risk of developing dementia when they ate a diet high in anti-inflammatory foods, compared to people with cardiometabolic diseases who ate anti-inflammatory foods. foods. It highlights the importance of managing behaviors that are within your control, including what you want to eat, how often you move your body, how much quality sleep you get, and what stressors you allow into your life.

Read the original article on eating well.