SMRs and AMRs

Monday, October 27, 2014

To Improve a Memory, Consider Chocolate

By PAM BELLUCK, NYT
OCT. 26, 2014

Science edged closer on Sunday to showing that an antioxidant in chocolate appears to improve some memory skills that people lose with age.

In a small study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, healthy people, ages 50 to 69, who drank a mixture high in antioxidants called cocoa flavanols for three months performed better on a memory test than people who drank a low-flavanol mixture.

On average, the improvement of high-flavanol drinkers meant they performed like people two to three decades younger on the study’s memory task, said Dr. Scott A. Small, a neurologist at Columbia University Medical Center and the study’s senior author. They performed about 25 percent better than the low-flavanol group.

“An exciting result,” said Craig Stark, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research. “It’s an initial study, and I sort of view this as the opening salvo.”

(More here.)

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