Personalized medicine care plans improved cognitive ability of people with mild cognitive impairment significantly after six months, a study shows. The care plans modified the participants’ lifestyle, diet habits, and supplements intake, as well as prescription medications for their existing conditions. The findings suggest that a holistic, personalized medicine care plan can improve cognitive ability. 

Over the past decades, researchers have been struggling to find effective treatments that can improve cognitive impairment in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. People with mild cognitive impairment are at high risk of progressing to Alzheimer’s. Intervention methods, such as changes in diet and lifestyle, may help them improve their cognitive ability and prevent disease progression. Mild cognitive impairment weakens people’s memory, judgement, and verbal ability.  

A recent pilot study investigated whether personalized medicine care plans could improve the cognitive ability of 23 participants with mild cognitive impairment, over six months. The researchers designed the personalized medicine care plan for each participant based on the clinician’s evaluation of and discussions with the participant. 

As part of the care plan, the researchers required the participants to take ketogenic diet that contains 60% of fat, 30% of protein, and 10% of carbohydrate. The participants also had nootropic food that can improve cognitive ability, such as memory. The structure of the care plan is shown in the graph below. 

The researchers used the Cambridge Brain Sciences (CBS) test as the main method to evalute participants’ cognitive ability, including concentration, memory, reasoning, and verbal ability. After the participants used the personalized medicine care plans, their cognitive ability was improved on average by 5.2%, compared with six months ago. The researchers considered this improvement significant. Of all the participants, 54.6% improved their concentration, 63.6% improved their reasoning, 68.2% improved their verbal ability, and 81.8% improved their memory. 

“It is widely accepted that AD (Alzheimer’s) is a progressive disease that begins decades before diagnosis, and the cognitive impairment often prodromal to AD is also progressive. Thus, any improvement towards the norm would be considered clinically significant,” wrote the authors. 

The researchers also anticipated that the personalized medicine care plans could cause unwanted reactions among the participants, including headaches, sleep disturbances, and weight loss. “The majority of adverse events were anticipated and included possible responses to taking dietary supplements (gastrointestinal symptoms, headaches, skin reactions, sleep disturbance, etc.), possible responses to changing dietary habits and eating a ketogenic diet (weight loss, irritability, stress, etc.)”, said the authors. 

A holistic, personalized medicine care plan can improve cognitive ability of people with mild cognitive impairment, especially memory. This provides an exciting and promising direction to improve cognitive impairment and prevent Alzheimer’s progression, for at-risk people and researchers. The authors also recognized that the medicine care plans can be costly and require high adherence from people to complete. 

This study was published in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Image credit: Canva

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