Can the Cabernet and Bree crowd evade Alzheimer's disease?

My friend Jim alerted me to a study published December 15 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease finding ways in which diet affects vulnerability to Alzheimer's disease.  The attention-getters were that wine and cheese consumption were correlated with reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease.  The study was entitled "Genetic Factors of Alzheimer’s Disease Modulate How Diet is Associated with Long-Term Cognitive Trajectories: A UK Biobank Study."  (Here's a more accessible discussion.)  It relied on an extensive database of medical histories of 1,787 subjects in the UK.  It was conducted by researchers from Iowa State University. 

Moderate consumption of alcohol, including but not limited to, the form of red wine, has already been correlated with reduced risk of dementia.  However, the idea cheese can be protective flies in the face of other studies, notably the work of Martha Clare Morris, creator of the MIND diet.  (Dr. Morris died of cancer about a year ago.) 

As we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster, the MIND diet is a hybrid of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, but it excludes cheese, stick margarine, fried foods, sweets, and red meat.  The new study also suggests avoidance of red meat, except that lamb consumed once a week is protective.  (Someone please alert Mary.)  For me, the hardest reach was to avoid cheese.  

Why does research lead to the exclusion of cheese from the MIND diet, while the new study finds that cheese is the most protective food with respect to resisting Alzheimer's disease?  One possible answer occurs to me, and that is differences in how data was sliced and diced in the different research projects.  

From the information I've seen, the researchers in the new study more finely characterized the different research participants with respect to the nature of their diseases.  I say "diseases" because it's increasingly clear that Alzheimer's disease comes in a variety of flavors, based on its genesis.  Some cases are prompted by the presence of the ApoE4 gene variant, while others are prompted by a variant of the gene for the amyloid precursor protein, and some arise from even more genetic variations.  And some variations of the disease may arise entirely from lifestyle problems.  Alzheimer's disease behaves differently in different diverse populations.  These differences seem to correlate with differing manifestations and behaviors of the disease.  The new study appeared to me to control for these differences differently from other studies.

We're hoping for more enlightenment in April.  That's when the results of the (hopefully) definitive study of the MIND diet -- The MIND Diet Trial -- are to be released.  We've been waiting for a couple of years for this, but I'm worried that covid will affect the release.  We'll see, but I'll write about it as soon as results are available.