Mice with early to moderate Alzheimer's disease had the disease delayed and even reversed with a healthier diet, U.S. researchers said.
Domenico Pratico, an associate professor of pharmacology in Temple's School of Medicine, had previously found a diet rich in methionine -- an amino acid typically found in red meat, fish, beans, eggs, garlic, lentils, onions, yogurt and seeds -- could increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's Disease.
In the current study, researchers fed one group of mice a diet high in methionine and another group a regular, healthy diet for three months. The mice getting the methionine-rich diet were divided into two groups -- one group continued with the amino-heavy diet and the other half was given the healthier diet for two more months.
"At the end of the study, when we looked at these mice, what we found -- very surprisingly -- was that switching to a more healthy diet reversed the cognitive impairment that had built up over the first three months of eating the methionine-rich diet," Pratico said in a statement. "This improvement was associated with less amyloid plaques -- another sign of Alzheimer's disease -- in their brains."
The study is to be published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
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