His excellent survey on the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (“This looks real”: Are we getting closer to a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease?, November 22) barely mentions the most promising approach, which is disease prevention. Alzheimer’s has multiple causes, and identifying those causes that can be modified is the direction we must take. Factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and limited social interactions have already been identified. Many of these are modifiable by lifestyle choices and by specific dietary interventions.
For example, people with prodromal Alzheimer’s disease who had inadequate B vitamin status showed decreased brain shrinkage and cognitive decline when treated with high doses of B vitamins in an Oxford trial. A recent report found that members of the UK Biobank cohort who had diabetes (a risk factor for dementia) had a lower risk of developing dementia if they adopted healthy lifestyles. If a fraction of the amount spent by pharmaceutical companies on Alzheimer’s treatment trials were spent on randomized trials of multidomain lifestyle interventions, there is great hope that much of Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented in the future.
Professor A David Smith
Gothenburg, Sweden
Source: news.google.com