In This ArticleView AllIn This ArticleHow Was This Study Conducted & What Did They Find?How Does This Apply to Real Life?
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In This Article
How Was This Study Conducted & What Did They Find?
How Does This Apply to Real Life?
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Photo:Photographer: Jen Causey, Food Stylist: Ana Kelly, Prop Stylist: Claire Spollen
Photographer: Jen Causey, Food Stylist: Ana Kelly, Prop Stylist: Claire Spollen
What Happens to Your Body When You Have Inflammation
But there’s another type of inflammation—chronic inflammation—that tends to stick around and hang out in your body like an irritating roommate you can’t get rid of.This type of inflammation can be damaging to your bodyand has been connected to many chronic conditions, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke (to name a few).
These particular conditions—heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes, which are considered cardiometabolic diseases—have, in turn, been linked to an increased risk of dementia. This also means that chronic inflammation is linked to dementia.
While researchers understand there is a connection between inflammation, cardiometabolic diseases and dementia, and evidence suggests there’s a link between inflammatory foods and increased inflammation in the body, they still have unanswered questions. Like, if people with cardiometabolic diseases follow an anti-inflammatory eating pattern, could they reduce their risk of dementia despite having preexisting risk factors for dementia?
This is the question researchers set out to answer in a new study published on August 12, 2024, inJAMA Network Open. Let’s dive in.
Participants for this study were part of the UK Biobank, an ongoing long-term study that includes adults between the ages of 40 and 70 from across the U.K. This study included 84,342 people from the Biobank with an average age of 64, about half of them female.
Other demographic information that was collected included race and ethnicity, height and weight, blood pressure, smoking status and physical activity. Researchers also looked at participants’ bloodwork for the presence or absence of a gene that indicates a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease.
Diet information was gathered via 24-hour dietary assessments administered at baseline (the beginning of the study) and up to four additional times over 18 months. The assessments measured the intake of 206 foods and 32 drinks. Energy and nutrient intake were calculated based on these assessments, as were dietary inflammatory index (DII) scores. The DII has been validated in previous research and assigns an inflammatory effect score to foods, based on what is currently known about that food’s inflammatory response. Anti-inflammatory foods receive a negative number, while foods that tend to be pro-inflammatory receive a positive number. This is one assessment where a lower number is more favorable.
A subset of 8,917 participants who were free of neurological diseases at the time also underwent a brain MRI so researchers could detect changes in the brain during the study period. This is important since dementia is brain-related.
After all the data was collected and numerous statistical analyses were run, including after adjusting for confounding variables (like demographics), the results were in.
Dementia risk was 31% lower in people with cardiometabolic diseases who ate an anti-inflammatory diet compared to those with cardiometabolic diseases who ate a pro-inflammatory diet.
And that’s not all. Remember the brain MRIs? The participants who followed an anti-inflammatory eating pattern also had significantly larger grey matter volume in their brains—indicating less neurodegeneration—and significantly smaller white matter hyperintensities—indicating less vascular injury.
Researchers state that these brain findings fall within the framework of inflammaging, a theory that aging and disease development in older people are due to breakdowns in the normal balance of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory processes as we age. In other words, aging boils down to inflammation and the presence or absence of it.
These Healthy Lifestyle Factors May Help Reduce Early Dementia Risk, New Study Shows
One of the conclusions these researchers note that their results highlight is that diet matters and is a modifiable factor in disease prevention. This means that modifiable behaviors, like choosing what you eat, can influence disease risk even despite having preexisting conditions—like heart disease, diabetes and stroke—that put you at higher risk of other conditions (in this case, dementia).
While aging is unavoidable, therate at which you agemay be at least in part within your control. In ourHealthy Aging Diet Center, you’ll find an array of articles on healthy aging and brain health. For example, we’ve got recipes and information on theMIND diet, an eating pattern that combines elements of the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, the latter of which is a diet for hypertension to help prevent or slow neurodegenerative delay.
We’ve also reported on howsitting too much can speed up aging,how sleep affects agingandwhat types of exercise may slow aging. Andthen there’s stress, which speeds up the aging process and can impair cognitive functions. Stress can also influence sleep and eating, which can influence exercise—and so the vicious cycle goes.
The Bottom Line
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SourcesEatingWell uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable and trustworthy.Dove A, Dunk M, Wang J, et al.Anti-inflammatory diet and dementia in older adults with cardiometabolic diseases. JAMA Network Open. 2024. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.27125
Sources
EatingWell uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable and trustworthy.Dove A, Dunk M, Wang J, et al.Anti-inflammatory diet and dementia in older adults with cardiometabolic diseases. JAMA Network Open. 2024. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.27125
EatingWell uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable and trustworthy.
Dove A, Dunk M, Wang J, et al.Anti-inflammatory diet and dementia in older adults with cardiometabolic diseases. JAMA Network Open. 2024. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.27125
