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How Alzheimer’s disease could be reversed through lifestyle changes: new research

  • A plant-based diet, strength training exercise and meditation can help reverse the disease’s symptoms, study says

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Diet, specifically eating a mostly plant-based one, is a lifestyle factor linked to preventing or even reversing Alzheimer’s disease - the most common type of dementia - according to new research. Photo: Shutterstock
This is the 42nd instalment in a series on dementia, including the research into its causes and treatment, advice for carers, and stories of hope.

It is not often you hear a hopeful story or read an encouraging study about dementia, given the sobering statistics about the disease.

Someone in the world develops dementia every three seconds, according to the non-profit Alzheimer’s Disease International. More than 55 million people worldwide lived with dementia in 2020, a number that is expected to double every 20 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050.

Dr Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, also in California, paints a brighter picture in a paper published in June in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy.

Dr Dean Ornish has four rules for better brain health as we age: eat well, move more, stress less and love more. Photo: Facebook.com/Ornish
Dr Dean Ornish has four rules for better brain health as we age: eat well, move more, stress less and love more. Photo: Facebook.com/Ornish

He suggests that radical lifestyle changes might not only slow the progression of dementia, but could even reverse it.

Anthea Rowan has written for papers and magazines on almost every continent and on a huge variety of subjects, from travel in Africa to mental illness in the States to education in Europe. Her work has appeared in The Times in London, the Washington Post in America and regularly in the South China Morning Post. She is the author of A Silent Tsunami: Swimming Against the Tide of My Mother’s Dementia.
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