Treating Alzheimer’s: Finding the Relationship Between A High-sugar Diet and the Severity of Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects millions of Americans, characterized by progressive cognitive decline and memory loss. Despite over a century of research since its identification, gaps remain in understanding AD’s causes and effective treatments. Recent studies suggest dietary factors influence AD progression, but the impact of high-sugar diets is underexplored. This study investigates how a high-sugar diet affects Alzheimer’s severity using Drosophila melanogaster, a model organism with 75% of human genes. The study addresses whether high-sugar diets impact AD severity based on sex-specific differences in climbing patterns and eye development. The null hypothesis, stating that a high-sugar diet has no effect on AD severity, was rejected, with p-values of .001757 for climbing assays and .000067 for eye development, both below the significance threshold of .05. This indicates a significant impact of high-sugar diets on AD severity. Sex-specific results showed that female Drosophila exhibited greater resilience against AD-related neurodegeneration compared to males, contrary to some human studies suggesting more severe outcomes in women. This may be linked to biological differences, such as hormonal influences or metabolic responses. Female flies performed better in climbing assays and exhibited slightly better eye development under a high-sugar diet compared to males. These findings underscore the importance of considering sex-specific factors in AD research and potential dietary interventions. Future research should explore these effects in more complex organisms and investigate how various dietary components influence AD progression and protein aggregation, aiming to refine therapeutic strategies and personalized medicine approaches.