Doctors in Europe and Canada have found that taking vitamin D reduces the risk of dementia by 40 percent among older people aged 70 and over.
Researcher Byron Creese from the University of Exeter, UK, says: “Reducing the incidence or slowing the progression of dementia has become an important goal for humanity, given the fact that the number of people suffering from it is constantly increasing. research conducted by scientists has shown that vitamin D can be an effective tool in solving this problem.
According to the World Health Organization, 55 million people in the world suffer from dementia, and one of the main causes is Alzheimer’s disease, which is detected in 60-70 percent of them. This disease causes the death of brain cells, which leads to a gradual decrease in the mental, behavioral and social skills of the patient, as a result of which he forgets what he recently talked about, an event or the names of relatives, and he gets lost in a familiar place, and so on.
The researchers decided to find out how vitamin D, whose molecules help remove protein “garbage” from brain cells, affects the risk of developing dementia. To this end, they followed more than 12,000 people over the age of seventy.
A third of the study participants took vitamin D regularly, the researchers said, allowing doctors to track its effect on brain health over the next ten years based on whether they carry the APOE4 mutation, which is a variant of the APOE gene that increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by several times. once.
Follow-up showed that 2,700 participants in the study developed dementia 10 years after it began, and that 75 percent of them did not take the vitamin. Thus, when all side effects are taken into account, regular intake of vitamin D reduces the risk of developing dementia by 40 percent.
This was most noticeable among those who did not carry the APOE4 mutation, the researchers said. Therefore, Kreese and his scientific team believe that the intestines of carriers of the APOE4 mutation are more active in absorbing vitamin D from foods than others.
Source: TASS
