Skip to main content

Remember to drink your wine: It’s good for memory

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.
These findings corroborate a study in rats, also evaluating the effects of resveratrol on the hippocampus. (Rats also suffer from declining memory with age, due to deterioration of hippocampal function.) After 4 weeks of either resveratrol or placebo, middle-aged rats showed improved learning and memory function with resveratrol but impairments in the control group animals. Resveratrol-treated animals also displayed increased neurogenesis and microvasculature.
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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Revisiting resveratrol: new findings rekindle anti-aging debate

Just when we thought the bloom was off the rosĂ© for resveratrol, the anti-oxidant polyphenol from red wine with multiple anti-aging properties, along comes new research giving life to the debate. But first a bit of background: As I detailed in my book Age Gets Better with Wine , it is well-documented that wine drinkers live longer and have lower rates of many diseases of aging. Much or the credit for this has been given to resveratrol, though there isn’t nearly enough of it in wine to explain the effects. Nevertheless, I dubbed it the “miracle molecule” and when it was reported to activate a unique life-extension phenomenon via a genetic trigger called SIRT, an industry was born, led by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, quickly acquired by pharma giant Glaxo. The hope was that resveratrol science could lead to compounds enabling people to live up to 150 years and with a good quality of life. But alas, researchers from other labs could not duplicate the results, and clinical studies disa...

Should wine labels make health claims?

Winemakers have been in a debate for some years now with the U.S. Department of Treasury's Alcohol, Tax and Trade Bureau (formerly the ATF, for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--yeah, that made a lot of sense) about ingredient listing for wines, particularly since the healthful properties of wine polyphenols such as resveratrol have been widely publicised. A couple of years back, an Oregon pinot noir producer gained approval for a fairly benign claim: "Pinot noir develops a natural defense against botrytis (mold) in our moist, cool climate - the antioxidant resveratrol." Since resveratrol is indeed produced in the skins of grapes subjected to certain environmental stresses such as mold, and Oregon's climate is certifiably moist, it seems a fairly harmless claim. However, the feds simultaneously disallowed placing the same wording on another vintage from the same producer, citing concern about making therapeutic claims on labels or creating "misleading" associa...