Magnesium voor betere leerprestaties en een goed geheugen*
Uit een Chinese studie, weliswaar met ratten blijkt dat het mineraal magnesium een goede invloed heeft op de hersenen, het verhoogt verschillen leer- en prestatiefuncties en zorgt voor een beter
geheugen. Omdat wel de helft van de bevolking een tekort heeft aan magnesium en het aantal ouderen met een tekort nog groter is lijkt dit een belangrijke bevinding in het licht van de toenemende afname van het geheugen bij het ouder worden.
Magnesium found to boost learning and memory
A study by Chinese scientists, published in the journal Neuron, shows magnesium could have a powerful impact on the brain, too -- and boost learning and
memory.
In a statement to the media, the researchers noted that diet can affect cognitive capacity. Because learning and memory tend to decline with age and disease, they decided to search for dietary factors that could prevent these changes by having a positive influence on the sites of communication between brain cells (neurons) called synapses. Professor Guosong Liu, Director of the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, led the new study to see whether supplementing the diet with magnesium could boost brain power in this
way.
The results suggest increasing magnesium intake could be a successful, drug-free way to improve brain function. It also supports
the idea that too-low levels of magnesium could result in increased
deterioration of memory in aging humans.
"Magnesium is essential for the proper functioning of many tissues in the body, including the brain and, in an earlier study, we demonstrated that magnesium promoted synaptic plasticity in cultured brain cells," Dr. Liu explained in the press statement. "Therefore it was tempting to take our studies a step further and investigate whether an increase in brain magnesium levels enhanced cognitive function in animals."
Using a new magnesium compound dubbed magnesium-L-threonate (MgT) that can significantly increase magnesium in the brain when used as a dietary supplement, the research team gave magnesium to lab rats of different ages along with their regular diet. Then the scientists checked the animals for behavioral and cellular changes associated with
memory.
"We found that increased brain magnesium enhanced many different forms of learning and memory in both young and aged rats," stated Dr. Liu. In fact, the research revealed an increase in the number of functional synapses and enhancement of a host of processes in the brain that are necessary for learning and memory.
"Our findings suggest that elevating brain magnesium content via increasing magnesium intake might be a useful new strategy to enhance cognitive abilities," Dr. Liu concluded in the media statement. "Moreover, half the population of industrialized countries has a magnesium deficit, which increases with aging. This may very well contribute to age-dependent memory decline; increasing magnesium intake might prevent or reduce such
decline." (April 2010)
