Did you remember to have a glass of wine last night? If not,
it may be because you didn't have a glass of wine to help you remember. The
association of wine consumption and better memory has long been suspected,
especially as it relates to cognitive decline with advancing age. Studies
consistently find a correlation between long term moderate wine consumption and
better mental function in older populations, but clinical studies – where one
group is prospectively compared to another – are still hard to come by.
One such study comes from the Max
Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Berlin. They
compared 23 older adults given resveratrol for 26 weeks to an equal number
given placebo. Before and after the study period, subjects underwent memory
tasks and neuroimaging to assess volume and functional neural connectivity of
the hippocampus, a key region implicated in memory. The resveratrol group had
improvements in memory retention and increased neural connectivity over the
placebo group.
But is it just resveratrol? A study from Columbia
University compared drinking patterns in a multiethnic group of nearly 600
New Yorkers over age 65 to actual brain volume using MRI scans.
Light-to-moderate drinkers, particularly wine, had significantly larger average
brain volume than nondrinkers. This fits with the several population studies
where wine drinkers have comparatively better cognitive performance (and not
with what we were told about alcohol killing brain cells!)
One person who would not have been surprised by all this is
the 13th century court physician Arnoldo da Villanova, one of the
earliest to recommend wine as medicine. He published a special “wine for
memory” recipe purported to be good for forgetfulness along with other
beneficial properties.
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