Lifestyle Changes Decrease Genetic Risks of Alzheimer’s

There hasn’t been much good news about Alzheimer’s lately, between the March announcement by Biogen and Esai that a promising trial of a potential drug treatment failed, and the July decision by Novartis and Amgen to stoptheir study of another class of therapies for the neurodegenerative disease.

But in a pair of studies presented at the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on July 14, researchers reported encouraging results from studies of non-drug approaches.

In one, scientists led by Dr. Klodian Dhana at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago followed nearly 2,500 people for almost a decade while tracking several lifestyle factors: their diet, whether they smoked, the amount of leisure physical activity they completed each week, how much alcohol they drank and how much cognitive activity they engaged in. The researchers found that people who reported healthier lifestyles overall—those who stuck to a low-fat diet, did not smoke, exercised at least 150 minutes each week at moderate-to-vigorous levels, drank moderately and engaged in some late-life cognitive activities—had lower levels of Alzheimer’s dementia. In fact, the more healthy activities the people adhered to, the lower their risk. Compared to those who followed none or only one healthy lifestyle behavior, those following two or three of the healthy lifestyle factors reduced their risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia by 39%, while those who followed four or five of the healthy behaviors reduced their risk by 59%.

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