Health Beauty Tips
Green Tea Boost Brain Function:
Have you ever imagined that drinking the antioxidant-rich green tea can boost brain function as it does with your physical health?
Yes, it can. Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland found preliminary evidence of beneficial effects on the cognitive performance with consumption of green tea extract, especially our working memory.
Over the years, green tea has been renowned as the healthiest hot drink of choice. And it is one of the most researched beverages to find out what benefits one could get from it, with evidence of many health benefits such as maintaining a healthy weight, lowering the risk of heart disease, diabetes type 2 and certain types of cancer.
This new study that was published in the journal of Psycho pharmacology claims that green tea extracts increases the brain’s effective connectivity boosting the cognitive functions, particularly working memory. In this research, a group of 12 healthy male volunteers were involved. Half of them received a soft drink containing several grams of green tea extract and the other half only soft drink without the green tea extract. They were given some working memory tasks to perform.
The research teams, headed by Prof. Christoph Beglinger (the University Hospital of Basel) and Prof. Stefan Borgwardt (the Psychiatric University Clinics) obtained MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) to analyze the brain activity and identified increased connectivity between the frontal and the parietal regions of the brain which leads to improved cognitive performance, in the individuals who consumed green tea beverage than the ordinary beverage.
‘Our findings suggest that green tea might increase the short-term synaptic plasticity of the brain’, says Prof. Stefan Borgwardt, researcher, and professor from the Psychiatric University Clinics in Switzerland. The researchers also mentioned that these findings may further help developing treatment for dementia and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
Though this study drops enough hints that green tea may turn out to be effective in the management of neuropsychiatric disorders such as dementia and can improve cognitive performance, it is still premature to know to what extent it actually helps. But right now, you can relax and sip a cup of green tea and take advantage of its numerous medicinal and antioxidant properties.
