Tea Blog

The notion that tea might be of some use in fighting against Alzheimer’s disease is not a new one. I first wrote about it at this site several years ago and then touched on the subject again early last year. As I noted in that first article, the Alzheimer’s Association says there are 5.2 million people in the United States who suffer from the disease and they now expect that by 2050 that number may nearly triple.

The first article cited four studies that looked at the beneficial effects of tea on Alzheimer’s while the second investigated how green tea and red laser light might be of help in fighting the disease. And while I don’t follow the links between tea and health as much as I used to, I couldn’t help noticing a report in Forbes recently that cited several new studies that explore the link between green tea and Alzheimer’s.

A Swiss study which was reported in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition tested “the neural effects of green tea extract on brain activation in humans” who performed working memory tasks following the consumption of the extract. Their results “suggest that green tea extract may modulate brain activity in the DLPFC, a key area that mediates working memory processing in the human brain.”

In a study reported in the Journal of Biological Chemistry British researchers at the University of Leeds examined the EGCG from green tea and reservatrol, a component that’s found in red wine. As noted in a release from the university, which spells things out in layperson’s terms, “researchers identified the process which allows harmful clumps of protein to latch on to brain cells, causing them to die” and “were able to interrupt this pathway using the purified extracts of EGCG from green tea and resveratrol from red wine.”

Another study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) that’s so common in green tea helps to prevent “the accumulation of amyloid plaques that scientists believe cause the brain deterioration associated with Alzheimer’s Disease.”

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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