Every three seconds someone in the world develops dementia and the rate is increasing. Billions of dollars have been spent on the search for a drug that can block the damaging build-up of plaque in the brain that’s thought to be central to the disease. But the results are not impressive and the side effects include bleeding into the brain.
Now that gloomy picture is being transformed in a remarkable and surprising way. Rather than pinning our hopes on another new, powerful and expensive drug, mounting evidence suggests that such seemingly old-fashioned approaches as diet, lifestyle and environmental changes, could dramatically reduce the number of Alzheimer’s cases.
An international Alzheimer’s Prevention Expert Team have calculated that over 80 per cent of them could be prevented in this way. A study in Holland last year found that having good levels of vitamin D, omega-3, found in oily fish, and B vitamins cut dementia risk to less than a...
