An important finding on the Alzheimer's front. Eating a low glycemic diet that is also low in fat, if adopted early on in life, might just help prevent Alzheimer's disease according to some latest research.
Unfortunately, starting to eat this way after symptoms appear does not appear to help patients retain their brain function.
It's not the first study to show that doing things at midlife (or even earlier) truly have an impact on your health as the years pass.
According to Alzheimer's researchers, doctors are aware that being obese in middle age is linked epidemiologically with a raised risk of dementia in later life. There may be times in our life where we are particularly vulnerable to problems, and these come at different times over a lifetime.
Your chances of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's go up quite a bit after age 70, and the condition could affect almost half of those over 85 years old. Still, experts insist that this disease is not a normal part of aging. It begins in a part of the brain that affects recent memory, then spreads over time to other parts of the brain. Treatment can slow the progression, and assist in managing symptoms, but for now there is no cure.
This latest research on diet and Alzheimer's looked at the effects of different eating plans on biomarkers that are known to be associated with the disease. Things like blood sugar level, cholesterol and lipid levels.
Subjects underwent memory testing after following diets assigned to them. A total of 49 subjects (20 healthy adults; 29 who had mild memory issues that predict Alzheimer's) ate either an eating plan high in fat and simple carbs (HIGH) or a plan with less fat and simple carbs, called, LOW.
After a month, the healthy subjects following the LOW diet showed changes in the Alzheimer's biomarkers, even insulin and lipid blood levels, that were moving in the right direction to keep the brain dementia free. In those who had some mild cognitive issues, the LOW diet displayed the opposite effect.
We still don't have hard-and-fast proof, despite plentiful research on the connection between lifestyle and thinking ability, that diet, or anything else for that matter, can prevent Alzheimer's or any other type of dementia in the elderly. A health conference held last spring came to the conclusion that advancing age is the top risk for Alzheimer's, though a genetic variation is also known to be associated with higher risk as well.
Until we know more, the best protection against life altering Alzheimer's disease is to live an overall healthy lifestyle. Eat right to bring down your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and perhaps Alzheimer's. Limit processed foods and be as active as you can, as often as you can.
Do what you can to keep other risk factors in check - work with your doctor to treat diseases like heart disease, and manage high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol levels so that you keep your body in the best shape possible.
Another study that looked at ways to prevent Alzheimer's disease found that biomarkers at different levels were tied to different measures of function related to Alzheimer's. This might help doctors get better at diagnosis, which is now done mostly on the basis of clinical observations. While a true diagnosis of Alzheimer's cannot be made until after death when an autopsy is performed, doctors rely today on a medical process of elimination if a patient has suspicious symptoms.
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