A study published in the journal ‘BMC Medicine shows that the traditional Mediterranean diet, containing foods such as seafood, fruits, vegetables and nuts, is associated with a lower risk of dementia. Participants who adhered more strictly to the Mediterranean diet had up to a 23% lower risk of dementia than participants who adhered less strictly to the diet.
According to a 2019 report by Alzheimer’s Disease International, there were an estimated 800,000 people with dementia in Spain. This number is likely to increase in the future given the aging of the population and the consequent increase in the number of people at higher risk of dementia.
Diet can be an important and modifiable risk factor for dementia, helping to prevent the disease and reduce risk. Previous studies on the impact of the Mediterranean diet were limited to small sample sizes and a small number of dementia cases.
Researchers at Newcastle University analyzed data from 60,298 individuals from the UK Biobank in the United Kingdom who had completed a dietary assessment. They looked at how well the participants adhered to the Mediterranean diet, using two methods of measurement.
During more than nine years of follow-up, there were 882 cases of dementia. The researchers looked at each person’s genetic risk by calculating how many different genes they have related to dementia risk. They call this the “polygenetic risk”.
There was no striking interaction between polygenetic risk of dementia and adherence to the Mediterranean diet. According to the researchers, this suggests that the association between greater adherence to the Mediterranean diet and a lower risk of dementia persists, regardless of individual genetic risk of dementia.
However, this result was not consistent across all sensitivity analyzes and the authors believe that more research is needed to evaluate the interaction between diet and genetics in dementia risk. The authors also caution that their analysis is limited to individuals who declared their ethnicity as white, British or Irish, because only genetic data based on European ancestry was available. More research is needed in different populations to determine the potential benefit.
Based on their data, the researchers conclude that a Mediterranean diet with a high consumption of healthy plant-based foods may be an important intervention to reduce dementia risk in future strategies.