Fighting Alzheimer’s with Nutrition and Exercise

While people may not show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease until they are in their sixties or seventies, neurological changes begin much earlier.

“Alzheimer’s disease starts in the brain more than twenty years before the first symptom,” said Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at New York-Presbyterian/Weill-Cornell Medical Center. “Alzheimer’s disease is not an older person’s disease. It’s a disease of younger and middle-aged people. And that’s how we have to shift the paradigm.”

Looking at Alzheimer’s disease as a lifelong progression is an opportunity, said Isaacson, the keynote speaker at the Drs. Joan and Peter Cohn and Family Lecture on Nutrition, Inflammation and Chronic Disease, held October 12 at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts. In 2013, Isaacson opened the first Alzheimer’s prevention clinic in the country, focusing on nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle interventions that people can begin well before they reach old age.

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Written by Julie Flaherty for http://now.tufts.edu