Exciting News on the MIND Diet

We have been waiting for news on the big MIND diet study (the MIND Diet Trial) being pursued by Rush University, the Harvard TC Chan School of Public Health, and Brigham and Women's hospital.  We have written about this study several times, and we discussed it in Beating the Dementia Monster.  We expected it to be the definitive study of the power of diet intervention to affect the course of Alzheimer's disease.  We had hoped to see some results by April of this year, but, probably due to covid-19, we haven't seen anything yet.

In the absence of the Mind Diet Trial results, another large study was published on September 14 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  While different in design from the Mind Diet Trial, it is a very credible study of 597 people who had died, many with evidence of dementia.  With their consent and cooperation, the study tracked the eating habits of these people over a number of years, tested their cognition, and then evaluated their brains in subsequent autopsies.  The results provide additional support for the MIND diet as one way of limiting the advance of Alzheimer's disease.

The study used data from the Rush Memory and Aging Project which has been ongoing for many years.  Their analysis of study data controlled for age, sex, education, APOE4 status, late-life cognitive activities, and total energy intake.  

The study data was very dependent on self-reporting of dietary habits, and there was concern that dementia could have affected the quality of this data.  Each participant was scored with respect to their adherence to the diet, so that these compliance scores could be compared to their cognitive test scores and other measures.  The concern was that people suffering from advancing dementia might not accurately record what they ate.  The researchers did a credible job of showing this was not a factor.

So what did they find?

According to the published research, "a higher MIND diet score was associated with better global cognitive functioning proximate to death, and neither the strength nor the significance of association changed substantially when AD pathology and other brain pathologies were included in the model ... The MIND diet-cognition relationship remained significant when we restricted our analysis to individuals without mild cognitive impairment at the baseline [when the study began] or in people diagnosed with postmortem diagnosis of AD..."

So one of the things they're saying here is that among people who followed the MIND diet more carefully, cognition did not deteriorate to the extent expected based on the amount of atrophy of the brain found in their autopsies.  Brains atrophied, but those who adhered best to the MIND diet still hung onto an unexpected level of good cognition.  This is consistent with some of the surprises that came from the Nun Study that we discussed in Beating the Dementia Monster.  They're also saying that the MIND diet was helpful to people who already had Alzheimer's disease at the beginning of the study, but it was also helpful to people who developed the disease during the years of the study.

Their final conclusion: "[The] MIND diet is associated with better cognitive functioning independently of common brain pathology, suggesting that the MIND diet may contribute to cognitive resilience in the elderly."

Speaking as one of the elderly, I must say this is really good news, and I anticipate that these results will be supported when we hear from the MIND Diet Trial people.  I have been applying the MIND diet now for several years, and I'm sure that it's contributing to my well-being.  But don't forget the importance of the multi-domain approach!  You still need to get exercise, make sure you sleep well, stay socially active, and control your stress.  These are all important!