Is there a formula for living that could help stave off dementia?
Halloway studies ways to prevent dementia with grant from National Institute on Aging
Associate professor Shannon Halloway, PhD, RN, FAAN, FAHA, is exploring whether changes to lifestyle health behaviors could be the key to preventing dementia with a $2.37 million grant from the National Institute on Aging.
The study, called InLife, will pool existing data from 12 U.S.-based trials with a sample of about 10,000 participants, says Halloway, who is the Heung Soo & Mi Ja Kim Endowed Faculty Scholar at UIC Nursing.
“This is the first project of this size that’s pooling U.S. based trials, focusing on lifestyle health behaviors for cognitive health,” Halloway says.
The study will include data from adults who are at least 50 years old, although the average age of participants is in the early 70s.
In a smaller, preliminary study, Halloway found four lifestyle behaviors that benefited cognitive health: physical activity, cognitive activity (such as brain games, reading and crossword puzzles), social activity (spending time or talking with others in any setting) and a healthy diet (a Mediterranean diet that emphasizes foods that support brain health).
Halloway’s hypothesis is that small changes to those four lifestyle health behaviors could help prevent dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease, and that “the most powerful combination of behaviors” might be all four together, she says.
“I do think that having a well-rounded, healthy lifestyle is the most beneficial for cognitive health.”
She’s also hypothesizing that the people who might benefit the most from changes to lifestyle health behaviors are those that have the “most room to grow” from the start.
Halloway says the benefit of pooling together data from so many trials – called data harmonization – is that the increased sample size will increase the power to detect small changes.
“This might help inform more tailored recommendations for the individual,” she says. “Meaning, if you come from a certain demographic background, or if you have a certain health problem, maybe there are certain behaviors or certain amounts of behaviors that need to change in order to receive cognitive benefits.”