The MIND diet is a well-known healthy eating pattern that combines the Mediterranean diet with a diet that reduces the risk of high blood pressure.
Recently, Yian Gu, Daniel Belsky and others from Columbia University published a research paper entitled "Diet, Pace of Biological Aging, and Risk of Dementia in the Framingham Heart Study" in the journal Annals of Neurology.
The study found that a healthy diet slows down the rate of biological aging and is associated with a reduced risk of dementia and death. The slowed biological aging rate plays a partial mediating role in the association between a healthy diet and a reduced risk of dementia. Monitoring the rate of aging may help prevent dementia.
In the study of dementia, the focus on nutrition is usually on the impact of specific nutrients on the brain, while this study tests the hypothesis that a healthy diet can prevent dementia by slowing down the overall biological aging rate of the body.
In this study, the research team used data from the second cohort of the Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1971. Participants were aged 60 years or older, had no dementia, and recorded dietary, epigenetic, and follow-up data. They conducted 9 follow-ups approximately every 4-7 years. During each follow-up, data collection included physical examination, lifestyle-related questionnaires, blood sampling, and neurocognitive testing starting in 1991.
Of the 1,644 participants included in the analysis, 140 developed dementia and 471 died during the 14-year follow-up period. To assess their aging rate, the research team used an epigenetic clock, DunedinPACE, to evaluate the rate of decline in a person's body as they age through epigenetics.
Healthy diet can prevent dementia, but the protective mechanism is not clear. Previous studies have linked diet and dementia risk to accelerated biological aging. This study tested the hypothesis that multisystem biological aging is a mechanism of diet-disease association. The study determined that higher adherence to the MIND diet slowed the rate of aging as assessed by the Dunedin PACE and reduced the risk of dementia and death. In addition, in the mediation effect analysis, the slowed Dunedin PACE accounted for 27% of the diet-disease association and 57% of the diet-mortality association.
The MIND diet is a well-known healthy eating pattern that combines the Mediterranean diet with a diet that reduces the risk of high blood pressure.
Overall, the results of this study suggest that the slowing of aging speed plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between a healthy diet and a reduced risk of dementia, and monitoring the aging speed may help prevent dementia. However, a large part of the association between diet and dementia remains unexplained, possibly reflecting a direct link between diet and brain aging that does not overlap with other organ systems. Therefore, further investigation of brain-specific mechanisms is needed in well-designed mediating studies.
