Sorting by

×

Green tea, apples and pears could help reverse age-related memory decline

Consuming green tea, apples and pears could help reverse age-related memory decline – but only if your diet is low in those kind of ingredients to begin with, researchers have found.

A study involving 3,500 people has found that people with a deficiency in flavanols – a chemical found in foods such as grapes, berries, dark chocolate, red wine, spinach, broccoli and almonds – are more likely to suffer significant memory loss as they get older.

Researchers have also found that those people can substantially improve their memory function – by 16 per cent after a year – by eating more flavanol-rich foods.

“The improvement among participants with low-flavanol diets was substantial and raises the possibility of using flavanol-rich diets or supplements to improve cognitive function in older adults,” says professor Adam Brickman at Columbia University.

Scott Small, professor of neurology at Columbia University, added: “Those participants in the study that were below the median (mid-point) level of flavanol consumption were the people who at the start of the trial had the worst memory.”

“They were given either placebo or dietary flavanols and after a year their flavanols normalised to the median. And in conjunction with that, their memory was restored, or normalised, to those who had high flavanoids at baseline,” he said.

Professor Aedin Cassidy, of Queen’s University Belfast, who was not involved in the research, said: “This is a really important study showing that dose of flavonoids called flavanols, present in tea, cocoa, apples, berries is key for improving memory in the ageing brain.”

He added: “The dose required for these improvements in brain health are readily achievable – for example one mug of tea, six squares of dark chocolate, a couple of serving of berries and apples would together provide about 500mg of flavanols.”

The study found that people with the lowest levels of flavanols benefited much more from the increase in consumption than those whose deficiency was much less pronounced.

“The effect size depends on how flavanol deficient someone is at baseline,” professor Small said.

Meanwhile, the study found no memory benefit for people who were not deficient in flavanols at the start of the trial – and it doesn’t appear to reduce the risk of dementia.

“For now, the strongest evidence is for ‘cognitive aging’, which means the memory loss that occurs as part of the aging process, not dementing diseases like Alzheimer’s. Cognitive aging is equivalent to presbyopia – age-related visual loss that is not caused by a disease,” professor Small told i.

He added: “The precise mechanism remains unknown. But we know that cognitive aging targets a particular part of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus. We know that flavanols specifically benefit the dentate gyrus. So, we have hypotheses for why the dentate gyrus is particularly sensitive to flavanols.”

Professor Small said: “It’s much better to concentrate on eating more suitable foods than eating supplements to boost flavanol intake.”

It’s not known how many people in the UK – or elsewhere – are deficient in flavanols and by how much. However, the researchers behind the trial have developed a urine test that could make it much easier to find out in the future.

For the study, more than 3,500 healthy adults were randomly assigned to receive a daily 500mg flavanol supplement or a dummy pill for three years.

The participants took several memory tests during the study period and filled in surveys that assessed their diet. The researchers said memory scores improved only slightly for the group taking the flavanol pill.

But within that group, the team found that a subset of people who had poor diet and low flavanol consumption at the beginning of the study, showed bigger improvements in memory.

This small group of participants saw memory scores increase by an average of 10.5 per cent compared to placebo and 16 per cent when compared to their memory at baseline, the researchers said. Annual cognitive testing showed the improvement observed at one year was sustained for at least two more years.

Professor Gunter Kuhnle, at the University of Reading, who was also involved in the research, described the findings as “exciting”, saying the results “suggest that there is an optimum amount of flavanols in the diet”, which is around 500mg daily intake.

The research, published in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on adults around 71 years of age who were assessed over a three-year period.

The team found that among those who had a poor diet at the start of the trial, consuming 500mg of flavanols a day in the form of a supplement improved memory function in these individuals.

Davide Bruno, of Liverpool John Moores University, who was not involved in the research, said: “This is a good and convincing piece of work. But it’s important to make the distinction between age-related memory loss and dementia. While the primary sign of Alzheimer’s disease is loss of episodic memory, age-related memory loss is common for everyone.

“This study does not suggest that increasing flavanols intake will prevent Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s worth noting that mitigating the effects of cognitive aging may actually postpone the emergence of dementia – so flavanols could play a part.”

Source link

Related Articles

Back to top button