Green tea boosts your brain power,
especially the working memory
Green
tea is said to have many putative positive effects on health. Now, researchers
at the University of Basel are reporting first evidence that green tea extract
enhances the cognitive functions, in particular the working memory.
The Swiss
findings suggest promising clinical implications for the treatment of cognitive
impairments in psychiatric disorders such as dementia.
The academic journal Psychopharmacology has
published their results.
In
the past the main ingredients of green tea have been thoroughly studied in
cancer research. Recently, scientists have also been inquiring into the
beverage's positive impact on the human brain. Different studies were able to
link green tea to beneficial effects on the cognitive performance.
However, the
neural mechanisms underlying this cognitive enhancing effect of green tea
remained unknown.
Better memory
In
a new study, the researcher teams of Prof. Christoph Beglinger from the
University Hospital of Basel and Prof. Stefan Borgwardt from the Psychiatric
University Clinics found that green tea extract increases the brain's effective
connectivity, meaning the causal influence that one brain area exerts over
another. This effect on connectivity also led to improvement in actual
cognitive performance:
Subjects tested significantly better for working memory
tasks after the admission of green tea extract.
For
the study healthy male volunteers received a soft drink containing several
grams of green tea extract before they solved working memory tasks.
The
scientists then analyzed how this affected the brain activity of the men using
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The MRI showed increased connectivity between
the parietal and the frontal cortex of the brain. These neuronal findings
correlated positively with improvement in task performance of the participants.
"Our findings suggest that green tea might increase the short-term
synaptic plasticity of the brain," says Borgwardt.
Clinical implications
The
research results suggest promising clinical implications: Modeling effective
connectivity among frontal and parietal brain regions during working memory
processing might help to assess the efficacy of green tea for the treatment of
cognitive impairments in neuropsychiatric disorders such as dementia.
Story Source:
The
above story is based on materials provided by University of Basel. Note: Materials may be edited
for content and length.
Journal Reference:
1.
André Schmidt, Felix
Hammann, Bettina Wölnerhanssen, Anne Christin Meyer-Gerspach, Jürgen Drewe,
Christoph Beglinger, Stefan Borgwardt. Green tea extract enhances
parieto-frontal connectivity during working memory processing. Psychopharmacology,
2014; DOI: 10.1007/s00213-014-3526-1
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University of Basel. "Green tea boosts your brain power,
especially the working memory." Science Daily, 7 April 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140407101545.htm>.