This common household ingredient may prevent Alzheimer's
A new study suggests that extra virgin olive oil – a key ingredient in the Mediterranean diet – may protect against condition linked to Alzheimer’s.
Research by Temple University, Pennsylvania, has found that extra virgin olive oil boosts memory, learning ability, and protects against Alzheimer’s disease symptoms.
The experiment used a well-verified Alzheimer’s mouse model to look at the effects of a diet with extra virgin olive oil compared to one without it. Researchers were specifically interested in three types of outcomes associated with Alzheimer’s: memory impairment, presence of amyloid plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles.
“Brain cells from mice fed diets enriched with extra-virgin olive oil had higher levels of autophagy and reduced levels of amyloid plaques and phosphorylated tau,” said Dr Domenico Praticò, professor of pharmacology and microbiology and senior investigator of the study, published in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.
A reduction in autophagy is believed to mark the beginning of Alzheimer's disease.
“This is an exciting finding for us,” said Dr Praticò. “Thanks to the autophagy activation, memory and synaptic integrity were preserved, and the pathological effects in animals otherwise destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease were significantly reduced. This is a very important discovery, since we suspect that a reduction in autophagy marks the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease.”
For their next experiment, researchers plan to introduce olive oil at a later stage of the mice’s diet, when Alzheimer's symptoms have already occurred.
"Usually when a patient sees a doctor for suspected symptoms of dementia, the disease is already present," Dr. Praticò explains. "We want to know whether olive oil added at a later time point in the diet can stop or reverse the disease."