By Sarah Ladd
Kentucky advocates for people with Alzheimer’s are excited by new research showing that lifestyle interventions like exercising and learning can slow cognitive decline.
Published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in July, The U.S. POINTER Randomized Clinical Trial showed that being social and keeping the brain active can improve brain health over time.
The Alzheimer’s Association, which helped fund the trial, says it’s the nation’s “first large-scale, randomized controlled clinical trial to demonstrate that an accessible and sustainable healthy lifestyle intervention can protect cognitive function in diverse populations in communities.”
Erin Abner, the chair of the department of epidemiology and environmental health at the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, said experts were already communicating to patients the importance of healthy lifestyle choices.
Now, she said, this new research provides “additional evidence” that those interventions are effective in supporting brain health.