Baked or broiled fish may lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease
“To boost brain health and lower the risk for mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease you should eat baked or broiled fish once a week,” new brain scan researchers suggests. They found that eating baked and broiled fish helps to save gray matter neurons, strengthening them in areas of the brain deemed critical to memory and cognition.
“People who eat baked or broiled fish have larger brains,” announced Dr. Cyrus Raji, a resident in the department of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Mercy Hospital. “They had larger brain cells in areas of the brain responsible for memory and learning. And an important reason is that these brain regions are at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”
We conducted that in those people with larger brain volume, “the risk for Alzheimer’s and mild cognitive impairment went down by fivefold within five years following the brain scans,” he said.
The effect that was seen with eating fish as little as one to four times a week was startling. “It is just a half serving a day,” he said. “And that would be a very small lifestyle change that can affect disease risk a long time down the line.”
There are more than 5 million people in U.S. who have Alzheimer’s disease, an incurable, age-related disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking and language skills. Older adults with mild cognitive impairment have less severe memory loss than those with Alzheimer’s but often continue developing the disease.
Researchers’ diagnosed 260 mentally healthy old people drawn from the Cardiovascular Health Study to assess the impact of fish on cognitive health. All the participants underwent 3-D MRIs, so the researchers could map out the size of each patient’s gray matter and track it over 10 years. They also completed the U.S. National Cancer Institute Food Frequency Questionnaire. The team then stacked up gray matter changes against dietary consumption as reported in the questionnaire. However the exact study results are still under the work.
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