March 23, 2015 – FINGER Trial

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Anchor lead: Can a multifaceted approach delay Alzheimer’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Can memory decline and the development of Alzheimer’s disease be slowed down by a global approach to risk factors?  That was the hope of the FINGER trial, recently reported in the Lancet.  Constantine Lyketsos, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, explains the undertaking.

Lyketsos: It’s very important to realize that they had a complex intervention with four elements: a nutritional element, physical activity element, mental activity element, and a social engagement element.  And each one of those they randomized people to either just general health advice or this very, very, very, very intensive intervention,  I was trying to quantify the amount of time, I was coming up with several hundred hours over a year’s time to actually deliver the intervention.   :33

Lyketsos says results were very modest for such a labor intensive effort. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.