Category: Cardiovascular Disease
The Mediterranean diet is an important part of any brain health program. A number of studies have shown that people who follow the Mediterranean diet have less chance of having a heart attack, and that changing to the diet can reduce risk for another heart attack. Consistent with our increasing appreciation of the relation of heart and brain risk factors, at least one study has shown that people who follow the Mediterranean diet more closely have a lower risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Just that may be enough to have you ready to try the diet, but you might wonder what it is and what you’re supposed to eat. That’s where Dr. Michael Ozner’s book comes in. Dr. Ozner is a cardiologist in Miami, Florida, and says that he has been using the diet to treat his patients for more than 25 years. The book includes clinical vignettes in which patients describe their experiences with the diet and how it has helped them. Although Dr. Ozner recommends the often-unpopular practice of counting calories, people who follow the diet may find that they can eat more and still lose weight because of the diet’s emphasis on low-glycemic index foods, fresh fruit and vegetables, and whole-grain breads and pastas.
In clear language Dr. Ozner lays out the reasons why you should be interested in the diet. He gives you an overview of the studies that have shown that people who follow the diet have lower risk for heart disease, and explains why. You may note that many of the elements of the Mediterranean diet have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant effects, making it similar in this respect to Dr. Andrew Weil’s anti-inflammatory diet.
But the book has lots more than just a description of the why the diet is important. It also has a complete 14-day diet plan and a wide selection of recipes that any cook can use to make the diet not just healthy but delicious. My favorite section of recipes is the one for pizzas. There is also a section with a number of recipes for desserts that are high in flavor and low in fat.
Overall, this is a very useful book that will help you understand the importance of the Mediterranean diet and will help you get started in following it.
The Miami Mediterranean Diet: Lose Weight and Lower Your Risk of Heart Disease with 300 Delicious Recipes
Hardcover, 432 pages, ISBN 978-1933771502, $25.95.
Click here to order the book from Amazon.
A recent study reported in the journal Neurology once again gives us more evidence about how important exercise may be for keeping your brain healthy.
The study looked at how fit two groups were. One group included people without memory problems and had an average age of about 72 years. The second group included people with Mild Cognitive Impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease. Their average age was about 74 years (this difference wasn’t statistically significant). Both groups included about the same number of men and women and were well-educated (many had at least some college-level education).
The researchers looked a measure of how well the lungs can use oxygen that’s referred to as “VO2 max.” It’s an index of how well the heart and the lungs work during exercise.
They looked at the brains of people in each group using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). From this, they could calculate how big several parts of the brain were.
They gave all the participants a battery of neuropsychological measures that assessed their thinking and memory abilities.
The researchers showed that for the people with memory problems (those with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease) there was a relationship between fitness and how big the brains of the patients were. People who were more fit had bigger brains. They had more gray matter – that’s the part of the brain that includes nerve cells. (White matter has the fibers that connect the parts of the gray matter.)
For the people who didn’t have memory problems, there wasn’t a relationship between the size of the brain and fitness. But in this group, there was a relation between fitness and how well they did on the neuropsychological tests.
This study shows two things that are important. First, it confirms that people who are more fit do better on test of memory and other thinking skills. Since other studies have shown this, this isn’t new. Second, it shows that the size of the gray matter in the brain in people with early stages of memory loss is related to fitness. This is new, and gives us a clue about why physical fitness might be related to brain fitness.
One warning: like many studies about risk factors and memory loss, this study is only looks at the way two things are related. Researchers call this kind of study correlational, because it looks at the relation between two things using a statistical measure called correlation. It’s important to remember that in this kind of study, we don’t know which way the two things are related.
It may be that better fitness causes people to have more nerve cells. On the other hand, it may be that people with more nerve cells exercise more. So although this study continues to emphasize the importance of fitness, we should interpret it with a little bit of caution.
The study appeared in the journal Neurology, 71, 210-216 (July 15, 2008)
Back in 2006, a group us that included Drs. Amarilis Acevedo, Elizabeth Crocco, David Loewenstein, Vineeth John, and myself published an article that presented results of a type of study called a meta-analysis. In that kind of study, researchers try to find all available studies on a subject and then combine the data from them. The advantage of this kind of study is that helps us understand results from conflicting studies and may allow us to correct for how well or poorly studies were done.
The subject of our study was whether there is a relation between having a history of depression and getting Alzheimer’s disease later in life. We looked at data from more than 100,00 people who had had depression. Our study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, 2006, 63, 530-538, showed that the odds of getting Alzheimer’s were about two times greater in people who had depression as much long as 10-15 years before. A study in the April 8th edition of the journal Neurology confirms this relation (Geerlings et al., Neurology, 70, 1258-1264).
A lingering controversy is whether depression is a risk for Alzheimer’s or whether it is simply an early symptom of it. In a well-known study, one group of researchers reported that people whose memory got better after being treated for depression still got Alzheimer’s later. Some people have argued that being depressed was one of the first sign that they were getting Alzheimer’s.
Other people have suggested that depression, even much earlier in life, may be part of the same process that results in Alzheimer’s disease.
Many researchers today speculate that the process in the brain that results in developing Alzheimer’s disease begins years and even decades before someone has the disease. Researchers are also interested in the connection between cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease. It turns out that some of the same risks that are related to cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease are also related to depression. For example, when some people have magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the brain, something called “white matter changes” are sometimes seen. Many people believe these are caused by vascular disease in the brain, and they are related to having depression.
What does this mean for your brain fitness? I think it shows the importance of keeping cardiovascular risks low, not just to keep your heart healthy but also to keep your brain healthy. If you don’t know about your blood cholesterol level (and associated lipids such as HDL, LDL, and triglycerides), find out. A simple blood test will let your doctor find out more about how your body is taking care of certain substances in your blood. You may want to ask your doctor about another simple blood test for a substance called C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein is a separate marker for cardiovascular risk. If your cholesterol or one of the other lipids needs treatment, your doctor may prescribe diet changes, increased exercise, and a medication from a group of drugs called statins. These medications can improve your lipid profile. People who take statins have reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
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Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. (more…)
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.