Can MIND Diet in People at Dementia Risk render Cognitive Benefits?

New study investigating the potential cognitive benefits of the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay (MIND) diet yielded not significant results, shedding light on the relationship between dietary patterns and cognitive decline. The study's findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study, encompassing 604 older adults without cognitive impairment but with a family history of dementia, aimed to evaluate the effects of the MIND diet with mild caloric restriction in comparison to a control diet with similar caloric constraints. Participants were randomly assigned to follow either the MIND diet or the control diet, with counseling and support for adherence provided throughout the trial.

Results showed that over the three-year period, both diet groups exhibited enhancements in global cognition scores. However, the difference in cognitive improvement between the MIND diet group and the control diet group was not statistically significant. The mean difference in standardized units was 0.035, with a 95% confidence interval of -0.022 to 0.092, and a p-value of 0.23. These findings suggest that, despite the theoretical cognitive benefits of the MIND diet, it did not provide a significant advantage over the control diet in terms of cognitive enhancement among this specific group of participants.

Furthermore, secondary outcomes involving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-derived measures of brain characteristics, including white-matter hyperintensities and brain volumes, displayed no significant differences between the two diet groups.

The study's completion rate was commendably high, with 93.4% of participants successfully completing the trial. This contributes to the robustness of the findings.

While the MIND diet's potential for protecting against cognitive decline has garnered interest from previous observational studies, this controlled trial suggests that the diet's cognitive benefits might not be as pronounced as anticipated.

These results emphasize the complexity of dietary effects on cognitive health and underline the need for more comprehensive research into the impacts of specific dietary patterns on brain function and dementia risk.

Source:

Barnes, L. L., Dhana, K., Liu, X., Carey, V. J., Ventrelle, J., Johnson, K., Hollings, C. S., Bishop, L., Laranjo, N., Zhang, S., Grodstein, F., Tangney, C. C., Aggarwal, N. T., Arfanakis, K., Morris, M. C., & Sacks, F. M. (2023). Trial of the MIND Diet for Prevention of Cognitive Decline in Older Persons. In New England Journal of Medicine (Vol. 389, Issue 7, pp. 602–611). Massachusetts Medical Society. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa2302368