Lifestyle Program Beat Basic Advice 55% on Cognition — SkimNews
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- The LatAm-FINGERS trial enrolled 1,065 participants at 12 sites across 11 Latin American countries — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay — and followed them for two years.
- The Structured Lifestyle Intervention (SLI) group of 539 participants, who received continuous coaching including supervised exercise, modified MIND-diet counseling, computerized cognitive training, cardiovascular risk monitoring, and 38 group meetings, showed 55% greater improvement on a composite measure of global cognition than the 526-person Flexible Lifestyle Intervention (FLI) group, who got only four group meetings and periodic health education.
- SLI participants also posted significantly larger gains in memory, executive function, and processing speed than FLI participants over the two-year follow-up.
- Lead author Lucia Crivelli, principal investigator at Fleni in Buenos Aires, said researchers did not simply translate the U.S. POINTER model into Spanish and Portuguese but adapted it — incorporating salsa and tango as exercise options and regionally available foods such as avocado, quinoa, açaí, aguaymanto, chia, and pumpkin seeds.
- U.S. POINTER principal investigator Laura D. Baker of Wake Forest University School of Medicine said the results show brain health can be improved across racially and socioeconomically diverse communities, and expressed confidence the structured model will work for Latino and Hispanic populations in the U.S.
- Alzheimer's Association senior VP Heather M. Snyder said structure and social support matter, noting the multi-factor interventions "may eventually be combined with emerging drug therapies to reduce cognitive decline and dementia risk."
- Findings were presented at AAIC 2026 in London and published in The Lancet, extending the World-Wide FINGERS network that originated with the Finnish FINGER trial.
Why it matters: Dementia is rising globally and Latin American populations have historically been underrepresented in clinical research, so an Alzheimer's Association-funded trial of 1,065 at-risk older adults across 11 countries showing that a structured, culturally adapted multi-factor program — not generic advice — delivers measurable cognitive gains over two years strengthens the case for scalable public-health prevention in low- and middle-income countries. Snyder's suggestion that these programs may eventually pair with emerging drug therapies points to a hybrid prevention model for regions with limited access to new treatments.
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