Unlocking the secrets of the Mediterranean diet: The Mediterranean diet has been the focus of several studies, all of which point to its significant health benefits.

Some studies have shown that individuals who follow this diet may be able to reduce their risk of heart disease by up to 50%.

Moreover, adhering to the Mediterranean diet has been linked to a decreased risk of multiple types of cancer, while also aiding in the preservation of brain cells as we age.

Additionally, the diet has been found to slow the rate of brain shrinkage by up to five years, making it a potential key to healthy aging.

A new report in BMC Medicine revealed that adhering to a Mediterranean-style diet may lower the likelihood of developing dementia by 23%. The study’s findings highlight the potential benefits of this dietary pattern in promoting brain health and mitigating the risk of cognitive decline.

The study found that those who adhered more closely to the Mediterranean diet had up to a 23% lower risk of dementia compared to those who followed it less strictly.

Prior studies investigating the effects of a Mediterranean diet have typically been restricted to small sample sizes and low numbers of dementia cases, despite the possibility that diet may be a significant modifiable risk factor for dementia that could be targeted for disease prevention and risk reduction.

Oliver Shannon and coworkers analyzed the food assessment data of 60,298 participants from the UK Biobank.

The authors assessed people’ adherence to the Mediterranean diet using two metrics. There were 882 episodes of dementia throughout the course of the average follow-up of 9.1 years.

They also estimated each person’s polygenic risk for dementia, which is a measure of the combined effects of all the various genes that have been linked to dementia risk.

The researchers found that people who stuck to the Mediterranean diet the most had a 23% lower chance of getting dementia than those who stuck to it the least, which is the same as a 0.55% absolute risk reduction.

The authors imply that increased Mediterranean diet adherence reduces dementia risk regardless of polygenic risk for dementia since there was no significant interaction between the two.

This conclusion was not consistent across all of the sensitivity analyses, and the authors suggest that further study is required to evaluate the interplay between nutrition and genetics on the risk of dementia.

The authors point out that since genetic data was only accessible based on European ancestry, their study was restricted to those who self-identified as white, British, or Irish, and that more research in a variety of communities is required to evaluate the potential advantage.

They come to the conclusion that, on the basis of their findings, a Mediterranean diet that has a high consumption of nutritious plant-based foods might be a useful intervention to add to future attempts to lower the incidence of dementia.

Source: 10.1186/s12916-023-02772-3

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