Omega-3 oils protect against Alzheimer's disease, says study

This discovery could be an important factor in preventing Alzheimer's by supplementing your diet with DHA or healthy oils found in fish.

• A diet rich in a type of fatty acid found in salmon and other types of oily fish might help protect the brain from Alzheimer's, according to new study of mice.
• Salmon is one type of food that is a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids.
• The study, published in today's Neuron, says that such a diet helped prevent memory loss and brain damage in mice genetically engineered to get an Alzheimer's-like disease.
• These findings, along with other evidence, suggest that people at risk for Alzheimer's might gain some protection by eating foods or taking supplements that contain an omega-3 fatty acid called DHA.
• "People can control what they eat," says Greg Cole, a neuroscientist at UCLA.
• Cole hopes that adding DHA to the diet might help reduce the rising rates of Alzheimer's, a disease that afflicts 4.5 million Americans today and could affect up to 16 million by the middle of the century.
• The UCLA team studied mice that had been genetically altered to develop the abnormal brain deposits, or plaques, that are hallmarks of this disease.
• They first trained the mice to find a raised platform in a tank of water.
• Mice fed the DHA-rich diet performed much better on the memory test, finding the underwater platform in most trials.
• In contrast, the mice eating the DHA-deficient diet flunked the test: More often than not, these mice couldn't find the platform at all.
• "They swam in circles at the edge of the tank," says co-author Sally Frautschy of UCLA.
• Mice on the bad diet had lots of damage where nerve cells connect, a type of brain damage often seen in Alzheimer's patients with more advanced disease, Cole says.