A particular group of people might gain advantages from taking fish oil to slow Alzheimers.
Including fish oil in your daily diet has been found to offer a number of benefits for mood, brain health, and lowering the risk of developing brain lesions, which are regarded to be a visual indicator of cognitive decline.
what about elderly folks who have already had white matter damage in their brains?
Could fish oil capsules halt the progression of illnesses such as Alzheimer's? A team from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) studied the impact of the omega-3 fatty acids discovered in fish oil on a cohort of 102 volunteers aged 75 to 95, who had few to no signs of cognitive decline despite the early stages of damage to the brain known as white matter lesions.
While omega-3 fatty acids had no effect on the team as a whole across the three years of study, they did significantly improve the pace of damage accumulation in one sub-group: people with the APOE4 gene, which has been associated to an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease.
While the medication did not appear to impact the growth rates of white matter lesions, those with a hereditary predisposition to Alzheimer's showed "essential improvements" in nerve cell breakdowns, which is another important measure of brain health.
A larger clinical trial in more diverse populations should be conducted in the future, according to neurologist Gene Bowman, who was at OHSU during the research. " The reality that neuronal integrity division decreased in people randomly assigned to omega-3 treatment who are also at elevated risk for Alzheimer's disease is remarkable."
The results indicate that while fish oil supplements may help some people who are at risk, they won't stop or slow the onset of dementia in general. "Our results demonstrated that over a three-year period, there was not a statistically significant distinction between the group that took fish oil and the placebo group," OHSU neurologist Lynne Shinto explains.
"I don't believe it would be dangerous, but I wouldn't say it's necessary to take fish oil to avoid alzheimer."
Even though Alzheimer's is a complicated illness, research on it helps us understand the condition better and find ways to treat it. Research that is as thorough as this one is especially useful in figuring out how and why the aging processes of various people's brains differ.
"That is the first Alzheimer's disease prevention trial to use current prevention tools, such as a saliva test and brain inspection, to recognize not only people at high risk for Alzheimer's disease, but also those ideally suited to receive a specific dietary intervention," Bowman explains.
