MIND diet may reduce the risk for cognitive decline

Key takeaways:

• Greater MIND diet adherence reduced the risk for cognitive impairment and served as a predictor for cognitive decline.
• Statistical associations varied by race and sex, researchers found.

Higher adherence to the Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay, or MIND) diet reduced the risk for cognitive impairment, particularly in women, results from a cohort study published in Neurology showed.

Several dietary patterns have shown both positive and negative associations with cognition. Healio previously reported that consuming a healthy plant-based diet for 3 years was tied to a reduced risk for cognitive impairment.

The MIND diet has also been connected to better cognition and resistance to neuropathology in past analyses, Russell P. Sawyer, MD, an assistant professor of clinical neurology and rehabilitation medicine at the University of Cincinnati, and colleagues wrote.

However, these studies have multiple limitations, “including limited representation of Black American people,” they wrote.

The researchers aimed to address these shortcomings by using data of 14,145 participants (mean age, 64 years; 56.7% women) from the population-based REGARDS study to compare MIND diet scores with cognitive impairment and cognitive trajectory.

They assessed the participants’ dietary intake with a food frequency questionnaire administered between 2003 and 2007.

Sawyer and colleagues found an association between greater adherence to the MIND diet and a decreased incidence of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.96, 95% CI, 0.93-0.99) after they adjusted for other variables.

They pointed out that greater compliance with the MIND diet corresponded to decreased risk for cognitive impairment in women (OR = 0.92, 95% CI, 0.89-0.96) but not in men in the fully adjusted model.

Still, following the MIND diet was associated with decreased risk for cognitive decline in all models.

The researchers did not report significant associations between greater MIND diet adherence and cognitive impairment based on race, but greater adherence served as a a better predictor of cognitive decline in Black participants (beta = 0.04) vs. white participants (beta = 0.03) and in women (beta = 0.04) vs. men (beta = 0.02).

The researchers explained that the biological plausibility between the MIND diet and neuroprotection is supported by neuroimaging studies “which demonstrated an association between healthy dietary patterns and grey matter volume, total brain volume, cortical thickness, white matter volume and white matter integrity over time.”

They also noted that greater adherence to the Southern-style diet — a dietary pattern high in fried foods, processed meats and sugar-sweetened beverages — had links to an increased risk for cognitive impairment in those aged younger than 65 years (OR = 1.84; 95% CI, 1.39-2.44).

Because vegetables and fruits are more expensive than processed foods, “individuals living in poverty may be eating Southern-style foods more often,” Sawyer and colleagues wrote.

“This is relevant because in our data, the white participants earned more than Black participants.”

There were some study limitations identified by the researchers. Black participants were more likely to not return the food frequency questionnaire, whereas the results may not be generally applicable to younger populations.

The researchers concluded that the findings suggest “that accordance to the MIND diet may affect cognitive reserve differently across races” and that further research is needed.