By Sandee LaMotte for CNN
Her depression worsened until the day her 33-year-old son sadly told her, “Mom, I didn’t think I would have to be your caregiver at this stage in your life.”
“For me, that was the wake-up call,” Jones, now 66, told CNN. “That’s when I found the POINTER study and my life changed. What I accomplished during the study was phenomenal — I’m a new person.”
The Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk, or US POINTER study, is the largest randomized clinical trial in the United States designed to examine whether lifestyle interventions can protect cognitive function in older adults.
“These are cognitively healthy people between the ages of 60 and 79 who, to be in the study, had to be completely sedentary and at risk for dementia due to health issues such as prediabetes and borderline high blood pressure,” said principal investigator Laura Baker, a professor of gerontology, geriatrics and internal medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Approximately one-half of the 2,111 study participants attended 38 structured team meetings over two years in local neighborhoods near Chicago, Houston, Winston-Salem, Sacramento, California, and Providence, Rhode Island. During each session, a trained facilitator provided guidance on how to exercise and eat for the brain, and explained the importance of socialization, the use of brain-training games, and the basics of brain health. The team leader also held the group accountable for logging blood pressure and other vitals. Physical and cognitive exams by a physician occurred every six months.
At six team meetings, the other half of the study’s participants learned about brain health and were encouraged to select lifestyle changes that best suited their schedules. This group was self-guided, with no goal-directed coaching. These participants also received physical and cognitive exams every six months.
The two-year results of the $50 million study, funded by the Alzheimer’s Association, were simultaneously presented Monday at the 2025 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Toronto and published in the journal JAMA.
