US POINTER, a healthy lifestyle intervention, helped participants improve blood pressure regulation of blood flow to the brain, reduced sleep apnea respiratory events, and increased cognitive resilience for adults at risk of cognitive decline. That is according to new data reported at CTAD 2025 in San Diego in December.
US POINTER is a two-year self-guided or structured lifestyle intervention program emphasizing cognitive exercise, physical exercise, health monitoring and nutrition. Three ancillary studies funded by NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA), POINTER-zzz, POINTER-NV and POINTER-Neuroimaging provided data about the program. A fourth ancillary study, the POINTER-Microbiome Study, which presented a poster at CTAD 2025, will report more fully at a later date.
“These studies tell us that the US POINTER lifestyle intervention with structured support has substantial and significant health benefits beyond improving cognition — and the benefits are in areas known to lower risk of cognitive decline and dementia,” said Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, Alzheimer’s Association chief science officer and medical affairs lead. “This positive relationship may multiply the beneficial impact of closely adhering to the structured U.S. POINTER ‘recipe.’”
One of the three studies, the POINTER-zzz study, analyzed whether lifestyle changes might improve sleep quality in a subset of 780 adults who participated in the US POINTER clinical trial. Respiratory disturbances from sleep apnea declined by 1 to 2 events per hour of sleep for study participants in the structured intervention versus those in the self-guided group.
Another study, the POINTER-NV study, examined 491 parent trial participants who completed comprehensive testing of vascular health at baseline, month 12 and month 24. Researchers reported significant benefits from structured intervention on the cardiovascular system and its ability to respond to sudden changes in blood pressure, compared to the self-guided group. The structured intervention also improved several measures of blood-vessel health in the body’s largest artery and the main arteries supplying the brain.
The third study, POINTER-Neuroimaging, explored how lifestyle interventions affect biological markers of Alzheimer’s and dementia in the brain. It used MRI and Aβ and tau positron emission tomography (PET) imaging among 50% of the parent trial participants. Results showed that people in the study with certain Alzheimer’s-related brain changes had greater cognitive benefits from the structured lifestyle intervention than those with these brain changes in the self-guided group.