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Chocolate compound may restore age-related memory loss

The Columbian
Published: November 3, 2014, 12:00am

The good stuff in chocolate brings not only good cheer and improved blood flow: A new study suggests it may have the power to turn back the clock on age-related memory loss.

In research that will need to be replicated by larger trials, a concentrated daily dose of epicatechin, a compound derived from the cocoa bean, made a typical 60-year-old’s memory perform more like that of a 30- or 40-year-old.

A small trial set out to explore the effect of dietary “flavanols” on the dentate gyrus, a structure in the brain’s hippocampal region that plays a critical role in certain kinds of memory. The dentate gyrus becomes notably less active and less effective with normal aging.

A test drink that concentrated about 900 milligrams of flavanols was produced by the Mars company, maker of a wide range of chocolate candies. Nineteen subjects between the ages of 50 and 69 drank the test drink daily for three months, while 18 drank a beverage containing only 10 milligrams of the cocoa-derived flavanols.

Upon recruitment and at three months, both groups had their brains scanned and performed a memory test assessing a distinctive form of memory for novel shapes and patterns — an assessment that tests the dentate gyrus.

The research was led by Adam M. Brickman of Columbia University Medical Center’s Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain and builds on research by Dr. Scott A. Small at the Taub Institute. It was published in Nature Neuroscience.

After three months, the group that got the supercharged flavanol drink showed greatly improved performance on the test of memory, while the low-flavanol group showed no such improvement.

Researchers’ separate scans of youthful subjects, aged 22 to 41, had shown two things: that better blood flow to the dentate gyrus is linked to better performance on the test of memory for novel patterns; and that along with memory performance, blood flow to that region ebbs with age.

In the older experimental subjects, the scans showed that compared with those who drank the low-flavanol drink, those who got the high-octane flavanol beverage had notably improved blood flow in the dentate gyrus after three months.

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