Blueberry juice is a memory enhancer for older people

The American researchers found out that a few glasses of blueberry juice within a day improve memory in older people.

They studied people at the age of 70 with early signs of memory loss. For all these people blueberries were like a memory enhancer.

The researchers announced that there is an urgent need to develop the ways of prevention of dementia which is on the rise as our population ages and there is no effective therapy for it.

Blueberries consist of polyphenols and anthocyanin which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects preventing oxidative stress which can lead to some neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases.

The International Berry Health Benefits Symposium suggests that these compounds have positive effects on cancer, aging, neurological diseases, inflammation, diabetes and bacterial infections.

The researchers also stated that animal studies showed that blueberries contribute to increased neuron-to-neuron communication, improve use of glucose in the brain and are involved in memory function.

For this research, Dr Robert Krikorian, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center in Cincinnati and his colleagues employed 9 people of 70 years old with slight signs of memory loss. They needed to complete memory and cognition tests and then Dr Robert Krikorian asked them to drink two to two and a half cups of blueberry juice a day. These older people wrote the same memory and cognition tests 12 weeks later. The researchers compared the results before and after. People who had drunk blueberry juice had improved paired associate learning (p = 0.009), word list (p = 0.04) recall and reduced depressive symptoms (p = 0.08) and lower glucose levels (p = 0.10).

These results were then compared with the results of another group of people of the same age who also had early signs of memory loss but this time they were given a placebo instead of blueberry juice.

The researchers announced that the improved results of the blueberry group over the placebo group on the same memory test were similar to the difference in the before and after results in the blueberry group in the earlier trial.

These prior memory results suppose that consecutive supplementation with blueberries may offer an approach to forestall or mitigate neurodegeneration.