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Healthy eating stalls elderly's cognitive decline

Older people who eat healthy, with more fruits and vegetables, nuts and fish in their diets, may be less likely to experience declines in thinking and memory over time, according to a new international study. "It is likely that a healthy diet has effects on cardiovascular risk factors and cardiovascular disease, and that this is an important mechanism for reducing the risk of cognitive decline," said lead author Andrew Smyth of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and the National University of Ireland in Galway in a Reuters Health report.

The results were similar when researchers excluded people who had overt clinical events like stroke, suggesting that the benefit may also reduce the risk of cognitive decline for people without such clear indicators of advanced cardiovascular disease, Smyth is quoted as saying. "As our study is observational, we can only say that a healthy diet was associated with a reduced risk of cognitive decline and cannot definitively say there is a causal relationship," he said.

Smyth and his co-authors used data from two multinational randomised trials of a blood pressure medication. They included more than 27,000 men and women age 55 and older who had a history of coronary, cerebral or peripheral artery disease or high-risk diabetes and who were followed until death, stroke, heart attack or hospitalisation. Half the participants were followed for less than five years. Participants filled out a 20-point food frequency questionnaire at the beginning of the trials and completed a mini-mental state exam at least twice during their respective trials.

Of the 27,000 total participants, 4,699 or almost 17% experienced marked cognitive decline based on their mental state exams. The researchers used the food frequency questionnaire to estimate how "healthy" people's dietary habits were, awarding higher scores to frequent consumption of foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, soy proteins and fish.

The top fifth of people with the healthiest diets were about 24% less likely to experience cognitive decline during the study than the bottom fifth with the worst diet scores, the study team reports. "Our study shows that those with the healthiest diet tended to be more active, were less likely to smoke and had lower body mass index," Smyth said. "This suggests that the consumption of a healthy diet is likely to be associated with a healthy lifestyle in general."

About 14% of people in the healthiest diet category had cognitive decline compared to 18% of those in the least-healthy category after taking physical activity, high blood pressure and cancer history into account.

"As foods and nutrients are not consumed in isolation, and the reduction in intake of one food usually results in increased intake of other foods, we think that rather than focus on particular foods, it is more important to focus on overall diet quality," Smyth said. "For example, some of the reported benefits of 'healthy' food choices may be lost by 'unhealthy' choices."

[link url="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/07/us-health-diet-cogntive-decline-idUSKBN0NS2A920150507"]Full Reuters Health report[/link]
[link url="http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2015/05/06/WNL.0000000000001638.abstract"]Neurology abstract[/link]

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