PERFORM Colloquium: Nutrition and Dementia Risk: Is there a recipe for success?

Despite promising results from epidemiological studies, most nutritional interventions to slow age-related cognitive decline fail. This failure may relate to a number of factors including inappropriate participant selection and the use of single nutrient supplements. This talk will discuss the importance of shifting global eating patterns to dementia prevention and how personal factors (e.g. genetics, other lifestyle factors) may limit intervention success or obscure the diet-cognition relationship in older adults.

This event will:

• Outline how dietary patterns or global diet quality may influence vulnerability to dementia.
• Specify the nutritional changes shared by randomized trial interventions that improved cognitive function in older adults by changing global diet quality.
• Present evidence that the influence of diet on the trajectory of age-related cognitive decline depends on genetic background and other lifestyle factors. 

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Matthew Parrott is a staff Scientist at the PERFORM Centre of Concordia University and a member of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging Nutrition, Exercise and Lifestyle Team. His research focusses on the relationship between nutrition and the trajectory of age-related cognitive decline.

Dr. Parrott received a BSc in Nutritional and Nutraceutical Sciences from the University of Guelph and a PhD in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Toronto. He worked as a Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging Research Fellow at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Health Sciences. He developed a Brain Health Food Guide for use in a randomized trial assessing the combined effect of intensive dietary counselling and exercise on brain health in older adults. Other activities included epidemiological analyses examining the association of food patterns with age-related cognitive decline in large group of healthy older adults living in Québec. A key objective of his work is to understand how the relationship between diet quality and brain health is weakened or enhanced by personal factors like genetics (e.g. APOE genotype) or other lifestyle factors (e.g. mental stimulation, physical activity).