Dietary patterns, Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline: Recent insights

urrently, we have no treatment for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Thus, identification of risk factors that are modifiable among healthy populations is a major goal for the prevention of Alzheimer's disease [1]. Dietary intake has been recognized as a promising target for Alzheimer's disease prevention [2,3]. With regard to dietary patterns, higher adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern has been linked most consistently to lower Alzheimer's disease incidence [4]. Only a few studies on other hypothesis-driven or exploratory dietary patterns in relation to Alzheimer's disease risk exist. Recently, a study of 14 402 elderly Japanese health insurance beneficiaries derived an exploratory dietary pattern by principal component analysis and identified a Japanese pattern consisting of a high intake of fish, fruits and vegetables, potatoes, mushrooms, seaweeds, pickles, and soybeans that was related to a lower risk of dementia [5]. Another study investigating a dietary pattern designed to measure adherence to a diet associated with plasma markers of inflammation, the inflammatory diet index, found no association with mortality from Alzheimer's disease