Can green tea improve memory?
Green tea is known by many benefits, including its anti-cancer effects or type 2 diabetes treatment, heart problems. Now we can add one more because a new study indicates that it improves cognitive functions of the brain, especially the working memory.
This is the kind of short-term memory that allows us to recall briefly, without note, a phone number that we knew and we just said. Thanks to this memory we can type this number directly without having to write it first. Working memory is used it thousands of times a day and this is what allows us to do work of some complexity, in stages, in a manner sufficiently smooth.
The ingredients of green tea were thoroughly analyzed in the framework of research on anticancer substances in previous studies. More recently, the scientific community has been asking about the positive influence of this drink in the human brain. Several studies could connect the green tea with beneficial effects on cognitive performance. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this effect of cognitive enhancement promoted by green tea remained unknown. This situation has been changed.
The authors of the new study from the University of Basel in Switzerland have found that green tea extract increases the effective connectivity of the brain, ie, the causal influence that an area of the brain exerts over another one. This effect on connectivity also led to an improvement in cognitive performance itself during experiments. The study subjects had significantly better results in working memory tasks after taking green tea extract.
This increase in connectivity in the brain could be an effective for use in treatments for dementia indicator. At least this is a good idea in theory, because in practice, those who took green tea extract offered no clearly superior when performing tasks compared to those who did not take performance.
According to the researchers, this could be because the study group was not big enough. Still, it becomes a small step that could be a big leap in dementia research.
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