MIND Diet Shows Small Impact on Preserving Cognition

Well, that would be obvious. The MIND diet has no objective protocol. So you have no clue if you are following it.

MIND Diet Shows Small Impact on Preserving Cognition

The Mediterranean-Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, known as the MIND diet, shows only a small impact on brain health.

“The benefits within [the current study] were not as impressive as we have seen with the MIND diet observational studies in the past, but

click or scroll down to continue reading the article

diet has no objective

Guillermo Garcia-Manero, MD

there were improvements in cognition in the short-term, consistent with the longer-term observational data,” said Lisa Barnes, PhD, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois.

Results from the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that over 3 years, there was no significant statistical difference in change in cognition for participants in the MIND diet group compared with the usual diet control group. However, there was a significant improvement during the first 2 years of the study.

“What we saw was improvement in cognition in both groups, but the MIND diet intervention group had a slightly better improvement in cognition, although not significantly better,” noted Dr. Barnes. “Both groups lost approximately 5 kg over 3 years, suggesting that it could have been weight loss that benefited cognition in this trial.”

This is the first randomised clinical trial designed to test the effects of a diet thought to be protective for brain health.

The MIND diet has 14 dietary components, including 9 “brain-healthy food groups” -- such as chicken and fish, green leafy vegetables and berries, and nuts -- and 5 unhealthy groups: red meat, butter and stick margarine, full fat cheese, pastries and sweets, and fried foods.

“There is established research that shows that a person’s diet affects health,” said Dr. Barnes. “The participants in this study had to have suboptimal diets as determined by a score of ≤8 on a diet screening instrument before the study began. It is reasonable to think that either they were going to maintain their cognition or decrease the rate of cognitive decline in the future.”

For the current study, Dr. Barnes and colleagues analysed 604 participants who were overweight, had a suboptimal diet, and a family history of Alzheimer’s disease. The trial compared 2 different diet interventions, both of which included dietary counseling with mild calorie restriction of 250 calories per day for weight loss.

Participants in both groups had individualised diet guidelines developed by dietitians, and they received regular phone and in-person consultations, as well as occasional group sessions throughout the study. Participants were seen 5 times over the course of the study to evaluate their mental abilities, blood pressure, diet, physical activity, health conditions, and medication use.

“Both groups of participants got a lot of support and accountability by trained registered dietitians,” said Jennifer Ventrelle, Rush University Medical Center.

Results showed that over 3 years, improvements in global cognition scores were observed in both groups, with increases of 0.205 standardised units in the MIND diet group and 0.170 standardised units in the control diet group. Changes in white-matter hyperintensities, hippocampal volumes, and total gray- and white-matter volumes on magnetic resonance imaging were similar in the 2 groups.

“The good news is that this helped all participants improve on average, but [it also] unfortunately hindered the ability to detect significant differences between the 2 groups,” she added. “Current and future research plans to look at people coached to follow the diet in this format compared [with] individuals following a usual diet in a format closer to usual care such as brief clinical encounters or a self-guided program with less support.”

“These individuals were healthy at the start of the trial and had no cognitive impairment, and their cognition got slightly better over time,” concluded Dr. Barnes. “Why there was no difference between the 2 diet groups at the end of the trial could be a result of many factors. Moving forward, we will look at specific food groups and their associations with biomarkers that were measured in the blood to see if certain nutrients and food groups are more important than others since the 2 groups were pretty healthy from a dietary perspective at the start.”

Reference: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2302368   

SOURCE: Rush University Medical Center