MIND Diet Trial Study Reveals No Appreciable Changes in Brain Morphology or Cognition

After three years, a comparison between the MIND diet group and a control diet group with minimal calorie restriction revealed no appreciable change. The study was conducted by the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago. The MIND diet was tested to see if it could enhance cognition and brain health as a potential defense against cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. The results of the study are described in the paper, “Trial of the MIND Diet for Prevention of Cognitive Decline in Older Persons,” which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Specialists led a randomized preliminary with a sample size of 604 older adults with a family background of dementia, a weight file more noteworthy than 25, and a detailed suboptimal diet. The members were partitioned into two groups, one following the MIND diet and the other following a control diet with mild caloric restriction.

A global cognition measure and brain imaging results, such as total brain volume, hippocampal volume, and white matter hyperintense volume, were used in the study to evaluate cognitive function.

Changes in cognition and brain MRI results from standard to year three didn’t vary fundamentally between the people who followed the MIND diet and the people who followed the control diet with mild caloric restriction.

Preserving brain health has been linked in the past to the MIND diet, which is based on the DASH and Mediterranean diets. Observational studies generally help the beneficial outcomes of a healthy diet, especially the consumption of green verdant vegetables, nuts, berries, and olive oil, on brain health and decreasing Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

The authors call attention to that past meta-analyses of diet trials have shown mixed results, and the noticed impacts are just some of the time replicated in randomized preliminaries. The authors propose a few opportunities for the discrepancies. One is research bias and confounding or mixing of impacts in an observational study where significant related factors may be ignored.

An outrageous example of confounding would be a study looking at the relationship between ice cream sales and incidents of individuals suffocating. While the two are connected in that they rise and fall together statistically after some time, the missing fundamentally related factor would be summer heat causing expanded swimming activity and ice cream consumption.

In a diet study, this could be in contrasting the health of individuals who as of now eat a diet with nuts, fresh fruit, and whole grains contrasted with individuals who eat more refined food varieties. Wealth disparities reflected in diet, such as living in food deserts, shift work, or access to health care, could be confusing factors.

By recruiting only individuals with a similar suboptimal diet and body mass and switching them to a designated diet plan, the researchers in this study attempted to partially avoid this confounding.

One more opportunity for the stochastic results of diet studies could be in the design or execution of the experiments. Contrasts in diet duration or follow-up periods, the presence of unscreened for previous ailments, and participant conformity to the review counts calories all could assume a part in mixed study results.