JAMA sub-issue: Professor Gao Xiang found that eating right and exercising can reduce the death rate of Parkinson's by half!

Parkinson's patients eat more whole grains, vegetables, fruits, beans and nuts, eat less red and processed meat; walk 10-20 hours a week or do moderate-intensity exercise for 5-9 hours, and the mortality rate can be reduced by 49%

On August 19, a new study jointly completed by Fudan University, Harvard University, Penn State University and Massachusetts General Hospital was published in JAMA-Network Open, a sub-issue of JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)

Picture description: Screenshot of the paper

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second leading degenerative disease of the central nervous system in the world, after Alzheimer's disease

According to media reports, the mortality rate of Parkinson's patients is about 1.

Caption: Screenshot of comments distributed by JAMA-Network Open to papers

The study is based on two Harvard cohorts of 1251 Parkinson's patients (625 males and 599 females) with pre-diagnosis and post-diagnosis diet and exercise followed up to 24-26 years

In terms of diet, the researchers looked at dietary scores for two healthy eating patterns, the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI) and the Alternative Mediterranean Diet Score (AMED)

The study also tracked the exercise of Parkinson's patients and found that men with 35-37 MET-hours of weekly physical activity (a research unit that measures weekly metabolic expenditure) and women with 18-21 MET-hours were more likely to exercise.

It is worth noting that the study did not find a significant interaction between healthy diet and exercise on the survival status of Parkinson's patients, indicating that whether healthy diet or active exercise can fully protect the lifespan of Parkinson's patients

"Through this study, we found that for Parkinson's disease, both pre-diagnosis and post-diagnosis, healthy diet and active exercise are associated with lower mortality

As an expert who continues to pay attention to all-cause research on neurological diseases, in January this year, Gao Xiang's team also published a study on the diet of Parkinson's patients in Neurology (a well-known clinical neuroscience journal), showing that flavonoids in plant foods (such as flowers cyanin), which can increase the lifespan of Parkinson's patients

Expert profile: Gao Xiang, professor at the School of Public Health, Fudan University

Editor-in-chief of Nutrition Journal, past chair of the Nutrition Epidemiology Branch of the American Academy of Nutrition and the Environmental Genetics Branch of the Parkinson's Society

Elected member of several expert committees including the Department of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and editorial board member of several SCI journals