I continue to keep an eye out for interesting developments in the world of Alzheimer’s research. A few have recently popped up for me. So here are some of them:
1. SHIELD – A new acronym. You may be familiar with the mnemonic for recognizing stroke: FAST – face, arm, speech, time. So now there’s a new one for Alzheimer’s: SHIELD – sleep, head injury prevention, exercise, learning, and diet. Paying attention to these will reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s and at least slow it down if you do develop it. This mnemonic was developed by neuroscientist Rudolph Tanzi, co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. You can read more here.
2. Your brain needs sleep. And speaking of sleep, we’ve had a lot to say about it and its relationship to Alzheimer’s disease. Now, there’s new evidence regarding how sleep works to protect the brain. It’s known that human growth hormone, or somatotropin, is released in the body while we sleep. It stimulates growth, cell reproduction, and cell regeneration, notably in the brain. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley concluded that sleep and growth hormone form a tightly balanced system with feedback loops. Neuroscientist Daniel Silverman is quoted as saying, "Sleep drives growth hormone release, and growth hormone feeds back to regulate wakefulness, and this balance is essential for growth, repair, and metabolic health." You can read more here.
3. More on sleep and your brain. And still speaking of sleep, a study at the Mayo clinic found that chronic insomnia may be just as influential on the development of dementia as being a carrier of the APOE4 gene. This was found by following 2,750 people over the age of 70 for five and a half years. The study participants took annual cognitive tests and had brain scans. Researchers tracked the development of amyloid plaques and “white-matter hyperintensities.” The white-matter hyperintensities were damage to parts of the brain involved in communication within the brain. One thought is that these two factors might magnify each other. Here’s a link to the published research. You can read a more easily understood article here.
4. Cocoa and multivitamin supplements may – or may not – delay cognitive decline. New research provides evidence that cocoa and multivitamin supplement consumption may reduce the progression of cognitive decline and help protect against cardiovascular disease. For brain health, the results were more compelling for multivitamins than the cocoa supplements. Called the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS), it was conducted at Brigham and Women’s Hospital – an affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston – and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (where my wife was treated for cancer a number of years ago). Wake Forest University also participated. The study involved 12,666 women aged 65 or older and 8,776 men aged 60 or older. They were followed for an average of 3.6 years through the end of 2020. At least with regard to the multivitamins, daily multivitamin slowed cognitive aging by approximately 60%, or the equivalent of 1.8 years over the 3 years of the study. It was harder to find a positive effect from the cocoa for brain health. However, the study suggested a 27% reduction in cardiovascular death and greater cardiovascular benefits among those taking the cocoa supplements regularly. Here’s a link to the research. Here’s a link to an article on the study.
5. Are all ultra-processed foods (UPFs) bad? Perhaps not. While ultra-processed foods (e.g., frozen dinners, chips, soft drinks, and packaged snacks) are clearly inferior nutritionally to fresh fruits and vegetables, applying the same negative label to them all may be a mistake. According to some researchers from the UK, the label UPF is a blunt instrument that excludes some foods that may actually be good for you. Since UPFS taste good and encourage eating (or overeating), they may be beneficial to older people who tend to lose weight, sometimes dangerously. And whole grain breakfast cereals would qualify as UPFs while being quite nutritious. Here’s an article on this. Here’s a link to the research. (This is all well and good, but I’m sticking with the MIND diet.)
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