TITLE: Mediterranean Diet Associated w/ 23% Lower Dementia Risk, INDEPENDENT OF GENETIC PREDISPOSITION: UK Biobank Prospective Cohort Study—N=60,000
Thank you Dr. Pope.
BMC Medicine includes a study: “Mediterranean Diet Adherence Is Associated With Lower Dementia Risk, Independent of Genetic Predisposition: Findings from the UK Biobank Prospective Cohort Study.”
Here’s how the article opens:
Preventing dementia is a global public health priority… Diet is an important modifiable risk factor for dementia that could be targeted for disease prevention and risk reduction [5, 6]. Healthier dietary patterns, especially the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet), have been proposed as a strategy to reduce dementia risk [7, 8]. Recent systematic [9] and umbrella [10] reviews have suggested higher adherence to the MedDiet may reduce cognitive decline, although evidence for a protective role of the MedDiet against dementia risk is inconsistent [11,12,13,14,15,16]. As most prior studies have been conducted in relatively small cohorts (n = 1000–6000) with limited numbers of dementia cases (n = 20–400), additional investigations which leverage large population-based cohorts are warranted. There is also currently no gold standard assessment of MedDiet adherence, and some variability in study findings may therefore be due to different dietary assessment methods and scoring systems [17]. Therefore, studies comparing different MedDiet scores directly and their associations with dementia risk are needed.
A healthy diet might also mitigate individual genetic risk for dementia. Previous studies exploring gene-diet interactions are limited, have reported inconsistent results, and, typically, focus on APOE genotype as the sole measure of genetic risk [13, 18,19,20]. Polygenic risk scores combining information from multiple weighted (i.e., according to the strength of their association with dementia) risk alleles predict incident all-cause dementia [21, 22] and are an important advance in facilitating in-depth exploration of potential gene-diet interactions.
The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between MedDiet adherence and dementia incidence in a large prospective cohort study, and to explore the interaction between diet and genetic risk for dementia.
Here’s how the Discussion opens:
Using data from over 60,000 participants, 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 (highest vs. lowest MEDAS continuous tertiles), which was equivalent to an absolute risk difference (reduction) of 0.55%. We found no significant interaction between MedDiet adherence, defined by both the MEDAS continuous and PYRAMID scores, and polygenic risk for dementia. In addition, we found that a continuous MEDAS score was a more sensitive predictor of dementia risk when compared with a binary MEDAS or PYRAMID scores.
REPRINTS & OTHER CORRESPONDENCE: John C. Mathers, Human Nutrition & Exercise Research Centre, Centre for Healthier Lives, Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Ken Pope
Forwarded by:
Michael Reeder LCPC
Baltimore, MD
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