Scientists Think Green Tea Extract Can Be Used To Cure Dementia

Green tea has been used for centuries to prevent or cure many illnesses. Also, since old times people have observed its beneficial effects. In modern times, too, there have been a lot of research studying its positive impact on human health and also to see if any of its ingredients can be helpful in treatment of cancer. Though many of those researches failed to reach a conclusion, a new study has shown something quite interesting, it says that green tea extract can enhance the cognitive functions especially the working memory.

The study, supervised by the team of Dr. Christoph Beglinger of the University Hospital of Basel and Prof. Stefan Borgwardt from the Psychiatric University Clinics found that green tea causes the brain’s effective connectivity to increase. In other words, it increases the influence that one area of the brain exerts over another.

In the experiment, the male volunteers were given a soft drink containing several grams of green tea extract before they solved working memory tasks. After analyzing the brain activity of the men by MRI, it was seen that the connectivity between parietal and frontal cortex of the brain increased and the subjects performed better on the memory tasks. The study concluded that green tea increases the short term synaptic plasticity of the brain.

Though anybody can use green tea extract to help them increase their memory, it will also have vast clinical implications and scientists are planning to try it out as the treatment of many neuropsychiatric disorders like dementia.