TIME – Lately, the biggest news in Alzheimer’s has been around a new drug treatment that can slow cognitive decline by nearly 30% among people in the early stages of the disease.
\In coming months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision about another such promising therapy.
But in addition to pharmaceutical interventions, which are expensive and require repeated infusions, making sustained lifestyle changes can also slow the progression of the disease, and possibly even prevent further decline, according to a new study.
In the trial, an intensive program of diet, exercise, stress reduction, and social interaction slowed the progression of cognitive decline as measured on standard tests for dementia, and even improved some people’s symptoms.
The study was conducted by Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a team of scientists. It appeared in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy.
Previous studies have shown that moderate changes in lifestyle can lead to some slowing in cognitive decline, so Ornish and his team decided to test whether a more in-depth, formal program of behavior changes could slow brain changes even further.
Ornish had previously developed the program to address heart disease risk and showed that the combination of improved diet, exercise, stress reduction, and social engagement could significantly lower the risk of atherosclerosis and heart disease.
“I have a unifying theory that many different chronic diseases share the same underlying biological mechanisms,” he says.
“Those include inflammation, overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, changes in the microbiome…gene expressions, and immune system changes.
That’s why what is good for the heart is good for the brain—these same mechanisms affect different conditions, and lifestyle choices can make them better or worse” …
