Psychiatric News (8/25) reports a study found that the Mediterranean diet “can help protect cognitive function in people with a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease.” The researchers “made use of genetic, metabolic, and dietary data from 4,215 women enrolled in the long-running Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) and 1,490 men enrolled in the similarly designed Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS).” Researchers observed that “individuals who more closely adhered to a Mediterranean-style diet had a reduced risk of developing dementia along with higher age-adjusted scores on the cognitive tests. Individuals with two copies of the apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) gene variant – a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s – had around a 35% reduced risk of developing dementia, whereas individuals with one or zero copies of the variant had a more modest 5% reduced risk.” The study was published in Nature Medicine. (SOURCE: APA Headliness)