A gene variant also known to cause diabetes can prevent stroke when it interacts with the Mediterranean diet.
The diet consists of eating mainly plant-based foods, cooking with olive oil instead of butter and spices instead of salt, limiting meat and fish intake, and drinking red wine (if desired), according to Mayo Clinic.
A study monitored a group 7,000 patients for stroke and cardiovascular complications over the course of five years. Half of the participants were assigned to the Mediterranean diet, and the other half to a more traditional low-fat diet, a Tufts University press release reported.
"The PREDIMED study design provides us with stronger results than we have ever had before. With the ability to analyze the relationship between diet, genetics and life-threatening cardiac events, we can begin to think seriously about developing genetic tests to identify people who may reduce their risk for chronic disease, or even prevent it, by making meaningful changes to the way they eat," senior author of the study José M. Ordovás, Ph.D., director of the Nutrition and Genomics Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA at Tufts University, said.
About 14 percent of the participants were homozygous carriers, meaning they carried two copies of the specific gene variant and were at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
"Being on the Mediterranean diet reduced the number of strokes in people with two copies of the variant. The food they ate appeared to eliminate any increased stroke susceptibility, putting put them on an even playing field with people with one or no copies of the variant," Ordovás said. "The results were quite different in the control group following the low fat control diet, where homozygous carriers were almost three times as likely to have a stroke compared to people with one or no copies of the gene variant."
The findings remained fairly consistent, even when other variables were adjusted such as BMI, medications, and diabetes.
Past studies have found the Mediterranean diet reduces the risk of other diseases such as cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, according to Mayo Clinic.
