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Last Updated: 2007-06-15 15:04:13 -0400 (Reuters Health)
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who consume plenty of flavonoids -- powerful antioxidants contained in plant-based foods from red wine to tea to carrots -- may be protecting themselves against the loss of brain power that often accompanies aging, new findings from France suggest.
Among 1,640 healthy men and women 65 and older, those with the highest flavonoid intake showed a slower drop in mental function over a 10-year period than those with the lowest intake, Dr. Luc Letenneur of INSERM in Bordeaux and colleagues found. These subjects also performed better on tests of their mental function when the study began.
It's possible, Letenneur and his team note, that high flavonoid consumption is a marker for an overall pattern of food intake that somehow protects the brain, given that people who take in lots of flavonoids are also eating more fruits and vegetables.
Regardless, he told Reuters Health via e-mail, "it seems more efficient to eat a great variety of food, increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables (bringing many important nutrients such as vitamins, fibers, and a bunch of antioxidants) rather than absorbing vitamin supplements to keep healthy."
Eating this way can protect people from heart disease and cancer, as well as potentially heading off mental decline, he added. "We are far from knowing the exact molecules that could be protective, but we already know that people engaged in eating fruits and vegetables are at lower risk of developing these diseases."
Oxidative damage has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline, but results of studies looking at antioxidant vitamin intake and dementia risk have had mixed results, Letenneur and his team point out in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
To examine whether flavonoids, which have strong antioxidant effects, might influence cognitive function, the researchers followed a group of 1,640 older, dementia-free individuals for 10 years, gathering information on their diet at the beginning of the study.
The men and women who took in the most flavonoids showed significantly better cognitive performance at the beginning of the study, even after the researchers adjusted the data for the influence of sex, level of education, and age.
And those who ranked in the top half for flavonoid consumption showed more favorable progress in their cognitive function over time; for example, after 10 years, men and women in the lowest fourth for flavonoid consumption had lost 2.1 points on a test of cognitive function known as the Mini-Mental State Examination, compared to a 1.2-point loss for the people in the highest fourth for flavonoid intake.
The link remained after the researchers controlled for factors including fruit and vegetable intake, calorie intake, and smoking. Nevertheless, they note, their findings can't show a causal relationship between flavonoids and cognitive function.
Additional studies are "needed to further investigate the relation between flavonoid intake and cognitive evolution, including other antioxidant molecules," they conclude.
SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, June 15, 2007.
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