Mediterranean Diet May Boost Alzheimer's Survival

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In addition, the patients completed questionnaires regarding their food consumption over a one-year period. Daily caloric intake was tallied for seven categories, including dairy, meat, fruits, vegetables, legumes, cereals, and fish.

At no time were patients given any information about nutrition, or instructions about what to eat or how much to eat of any particular food group.

Throughout the full study period, the researchers tracked patients for an average of four-and-a-half years, during which time 85 patients died.

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Scarmeas' group found that patients whose consumption habits most closely tracked that of the Mediterranean diet were 76 percent less likely to die in the study period than those whose food intake least mimicked the diet.

Compared with those whose diets most closely resembled a Western diet, Alzheimer's patients who most closely followed the Mediterranean diet lived an average of four years longer.

A more moderate degree of adherence to the Mediterranean diet still translated into extra 1.3 years of survival, the researchers said. That's equal to a 29 percent to 35 percent reduced risk for dying during the study period.

The findings appeared to hold up regardless of patient body mass index, gender, ethnicity, or educational background. Age differences had a nearly imperceptible impact on the findings.

The researchers did not examine how differences in end-of-life care protocols -- such as the possible use of artificial feeding mechanisms and antibiotic therapies -- might have affected survival in some patients.

Scarmeas emphasized that more work needs to be done to tease out the diet's effects.

"For now, we can only speak about the tendency we found in a whole population," he cautioned. "It is possible that particular people happen to have a constellation of several other factors that contribute to a risk for dying or delay their mortality. So, right now, we can only say that in this observational study we found, in general, that the more you follow this Mediterranean diet, the later you die, even after the onset of Alzheimer's disease."

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