Folic Acid Keeps Your Brain Sharp
Are you taking 800 mcg a day of folic acid?
If not, you are not getting the dose needed to keep your aging brain younger and possibly slow cognitive decline and prevent Alzheimer’s.
Commenting on a new study published in The Lancet, Marilyn Albert, noted Alzheimer’s researcher and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, agreed that folic acid offers significant brain protection. She says the long study of folic acid shows it is safe at the 800 mcg dose used in a new Dutch study.
Specifically, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, studied 818 subjects aged 50 to 70 with high homocysteine levels and found that those who took 800 mcg folic acid daily for three years had better memory and information-processing speed than those on placebo.
The difference was dramatic. On memory tests, people taking 800 mcg folic acid daily scored as well as people 5.5 years younger, and they scored as well on cognitive speed as people 1.9 years younger.
It is unknown whether a daily 800 mcg of folic acid can prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s, but Dr. Albert noted that "We know Alzheimer’s disease, the pathology, begins many, many years before the symptoms." Other experts say by slowing normal brain function decline, as folic acid did in this study, a person may slow such pathology leading to Alzheimer’s.
"We ought to be thinking about the health of our brain the same way we think about the health of our heart," says Dr. Albert.
Folic acid may help reduce inflammation and/or blunt expression of genes involved in dementia.
(Source: Durga J, et al, Lancet 2007; 369:208-216)
