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30/04/2024 - Institutional news

Hospital del Mar Research Institute leads study to determine dietary recommendations to prevent cognitive impairment in the United States and Europe

Is there any type of diet that really works to prevent cognitive decline? Despite all the publications on this question, the scientific evidence is not conclusive. For this reason, the Institute for the Advancement of Foord and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS), in the United States, a body that acts as an advisor to the US government, has commissioned the Hospital del Mar Research Institute and the Epidemiology and Community Health Division of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health to conduct the first meta-analysis with individual data on the question. In other words, a study that, based on the longitudinal analysis of population cohort studies in the United States and European countries, should make it possible to harmonize the information and draw common conclusions on the relationship between diet and the prevention of diseases that affect cognition, such as Alzheimer's disease, with higher quality results than those obtained to date.

The team responsible for the study has just published in Frontiers in Nutrition a first article explaining the methodology to be applied in the work. The study aims to take advantage of existing data to identify dietary patterns, such as the Mediterranean diet, and see how they are associated with cognition and dementia. To do this, they will work to harmonize data from different longitudinal studies across the Atlantic Ocean. They will analyze data from more than 30,000 people from the United States and cohorts from the United Kingdom, Finland, Spain and Italy, with a follow-up of between two and 17 years, assessing different recommended dietary patterns. The study will serve as a guide to combine individual-scale data from research studies on the relationship between dietary patterns and cognition.

In this way, it seeks to identify dietary factors that contribute to cognitive health and ultimately guide the dietary habits of the EU and US population as a whole. It will also serve as a guide for future research initiatives in the area of retrospective data harmonization.

From left to right: Rafael de la Torre Fornell, Natàlia Soldevila-Domènech and Amaia Ayala García

According to Amaia Ayala-García and Natàlia Soldevila-Domènech, researchers at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute who lead the work, "it will serve as a guide to combine data at the individual level of research studies on the relationship between dietary patterns and cognition. The approach aims to leverage existing data to identify associated factors in both cognition and dementia." "Data harmonization encompasses numerous difficulties arising from differences in study designs, including assessment tools, length of follow-up and analytical approaches," to which there is the added cultural challenge in the case of international studies. For this reason, "we are adding a series of dietary patterns that are representative of these populations to produce generalizable results, which can influence dietary policies in each country," according to Rafael de la Torre, coordinator of the Institute's Integrative pharmacology and systems neuroscience Research Group.

Los resultados tienen que servir para desarrollar recomendaciones para tomar decisiones sobre políticas de promoción de hábitos dietéticos. En el caso de los Estados Unidos, cada cinco años se revisan las evidencias que dan apoyo a las directrices dietéticas para la población, y afectan tanto a los programas federales de nutrición, como al de comida escolar y a los paquetes de alimentos para el Programa Especial de Nutrición Suplementaria para mujeres, recién nacidos y niños (WIC).

Reference Article

Ayala-Garcia A, Soldevila-Domenech N, Yi SY, de la Torre R, Steffen LM; IAFNS Retrospective Harmonization Expert Working Group. Diet patterns associated with cognitive decline: methods to harmonize data from European and US cohort studies. Front Nutr. 2024 Mar 21;11:1379531. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1379531. PMID: 38577153; PMCID: PMC10992460.

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