Study examines if 4 lifestyle changes can prevent or reverse Alzheimer's

Doctors are testing if four lifestyle changes can slow, stop — or even reverse — Alzheimer's disease without using drugs or surgery.

Dr. Dean Ornish, who founded the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in California, is leading the clinical trial.

"For the last 45 years, I've directed research showing that simple lifestyle changes: what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get and how much love and social support we have cannot only help prevent, but often reverse the progression of the most common and costly chronic diseases," said Ornish, who is also a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

Through previous studies, Ornish found that lifestyle changes can reverse heart disease in some patients. Now, he’s seeing if it works in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

"What's good for your heart is good for your brain. We know that Alzheimer's and heart disease share many of these same underlying biological mechanisms," Ornish said.

Healthy eating and exercise have been shown to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and dementia but this research takes it a step further to see if it can actually prevent or reverse the disease.

Participants of the study will follow a lifestyle medicine program that includes:

1. Eating a whole foods, plant-based diet: "Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products, ideally as close as they come in nature as possible, minimally processed, low in fat, low in sugar," Ornish said.
2. Getting moderate exercise: Ornish said walking half-an-hour to an hour three times a week and incorporating some strength training qualifies as moderate exercise.
3. Reducing stress: Using meditation and other yoga-based stress management techniques.
4. Increasing social support: Joining support groups or spending quality time with friends and family.

"To reduce it to its essence: to eat well, move more, stress less and love more. That's it," Ornish said.

Ornish is teaming up with leading neurologists across the country, including at Harvard Medical School, to put the theory to the test.

"Our unique contribution has been to be using these very high tech, expensive state of the art scientific measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low tech and low cost interventions can be," he said.

While the results of the trial aren’t expected until next year, others in the field are watching closely.

Dr. Jessica Caldwell, with the Women's Alzheimer's Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas, said she encourages her patients to get moving to keep their mind sharp.

"Physical exercise directly impacts the brain right away, as well as for months afterward," Caldwell said. "It changes the levels of your neurochemistry that supports memory. When we exercise, it improves our mood, it can reduce our stress levels."

More than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's. Doctors said the disease starts decades before a person develops memory loss and other symptoms.