The MIND-AD trial was a 6-month multinational (Sweden, Finland, Germany, France) proof-of-concept randomised controlled trial. Participants were 60–85 years old, had very early (prodromal) Alzheimer’s disease and not-well managed vascular/lifestyle risk factors. New results from MIND-AD have recently been published in the Alzheimer’s translational research journal, Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy. The trial was supported by the EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) and the following JPND projects EU-FINGERS and Multi-MeMo.
MIND-ADmini builds on the successful results and experience of the pioneering FINGER study, which earlier showed cognitive benefits from a multidomain lifestyle intervention in at-risk older people from the community. In parallel, the LipiDiDiet trial highlighted clinical benefits of medical food (Fortasyn Connect) in people with prodromal Alzheimer’s disease. However, the feasibility and impact of multidomain interventions combining lifestyle with medical food in prodromal Alzheimer’s disease has not been studied earlier. The multinational MIND-ADmini trial demonstrated for the first time that a multidomain lifestyle intervention, alone or combined with medical food, is feasible and beneficial for persons with early (prodromal) Alzheimer’s disease. The intervention was safe, well-adhered, with the lifestyle+medical food group showing a reduced rate of cognitive-functional decline after 6 months.
“MIND-AD has been a natural next step to combine two successful approaches – non-pharmacological and medical food – and test their feasibility and potential synergy in people who already experience cognitive symptoms due to Alzheimer’s disease. The encouraging results of MIND-AD pave the way to design larger clinical trials investigating longer-term cognitive and other health benefits of combined non-pharmacological and pharmacological approaches.” says Professor Miia Kivipelto from Karolinska Institute and FINGERS Brain Health Institute, who led both MIND-AD and FINGER trials, and is the scientific leader of both the World-Wide FINGERS network and the EU-FINGERS project. “These findings add to the growing body of evidence that moderate multimodal lifestyle changes may help reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or slow its progression, and also suggest that more intensive multimodal lifestyle changes may have additional benefits for improving cognition in people with early Alzheimer’s disease”, pointed out Professor Alina Solomon from the Brain Research Unit at University of Eastern Finland, Scientific Coordinator for the MIND-ADmini trial and Multi-MeMo project coordinator.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13195-024-01468-x