Study: eating fish could reduce risk for Alzheimer’s

IT turns out that consuming seafood at least once per week can help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, a new study has found.

Although seafood is known to contain mercury, scientists delved into the question of whether or not that nullifies the benefit it has on staving off Alzheimer’s.

“Our hypothesis was that seafood consumption would be associated with less neuropathology, but that if there were higher levels of mercury in the brain, that would work against that. But we didn’t find that at all,” said lead study author Martha Clare Morris, a professor of epidemiology at Rush University Medical Center.

Morris and her colleagues analyzed a database of about 300 people living in the Chicago area who completed regular diet questionnaires and agreed to donate their brains to research after they died.

Researchers found that individuals who consumed seafood at least once per week had higher levels of mercury in their brain compared to those who ate less. However, those with a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s called ApoE4 and ate seafood at least once a week showed less harmful proteins in their brain.

“The take-home message is that the concern about eating seafood because of mercury should be allayed somewhat by this study since we didn’t see any evidence that increased levels of mercury in the brain is causing brain pathologies,” Morris said, TIME reported.

Researchers also found that eating more than one serving of fish did not boost prevention against brain damage associated with dementia.

A limitation of the study is that scientists only observed the benefit of fish in participants with the ApoE4 gene. Furthermore, it did not reveal if participants who suffered less brain damage showed fewer symptoms of dementia while they were alive.

Morris said that those without ApoE4 may still benefit from eating seafood once per week, but noted that the amount of Alzheimer’s proteins in their brains may be too little for researchers to notice any effect.

The study was published Tuesday, Feb. 2, in the Journal of the American Medical Association.