A healthy lifestyle, combining physical and cognitive exercise with a good diet, can help reduce the risk of dementia, according to joint research by teams from Switzerland and the USA.
They analysed the potential impact of a healthy lifestyle on the number of years spent living with and without Alzheimer’s, scrutinising data from 2,449 participants in the Chicago Health and Aging Project (CHAP).
All participants were aged 65 years and older, with an average age of 76, and none had a history of dementia.
They each completed detailed diet and lifestyle questionnaires and a healthy lifestyle score based on: a hybrid Mediterranean-DASH Diet (a diet rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables and berries and low in fast/fried food, and red meats); late-life cognitively stimulating activities, such as reading, crosswords or visiting a museum; at least 150 minutes a week of physical activity; not smoking; low to moderate alcohol consumption.
For each lifestyle factor, participants received a score of 1 if they met the healthy criteria and 0 if they did not.
After taking account of other potentially influential factors, including age, sex, ethnicity and education, the researchers found that, on average, the total life expectancy at age 65 in women and men with a healthy lifestyle was 24.2 and 23.1 years, respectively.
But for women and men with a less healthy lifestyle, life expectancy was shorter at 21.1 and 17.4 years, the study shows.
Writing in today’s edition of *The BMJ*, the team writes that women and men with a healthy lifestyle, 10.8% (2.6 years) and 6.1% (1.4 years) of the remaining years were lived with Alzheimer’s respectively, compared to 19.3% (4.1 years) and 12.0% (2.1 years) for study participants with a less healthy lifestyle.
At the age 85, these differences were even greater, say the researchers.
Although this was an observational study, which cannot establish cause, the researchers, led by Klodian Dhana, of Rush Medical College, Chicago, says: “This investigation suggests that a prolonged life expectancy owing to a healthy lifestyle is not accompanied by an increased number of years living with Alzheimer’s dementia.”
Dhana K, Franco OH, Ritz EM et al. Healthy lifestyle and life expectancy with and without Alzheimer’s dementia: population based cohort study. *BMJ* 14 April 2022; doi: 10.1136/ bmj-2021-068390
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