Science Daily | November 4, 2013

November is National Alzheimer’s Awareness Month and the serious issues of cognitive health will be in the spotlight in the coming weeks. The medical community agrees that cognitive impairment (CI), ranging from mild to severe, is almost epidemic in the U.S. as the Baby Boomer generation is aging and living longer. Scientists believe one reason is that the human brain begins shrinking after age 25. Structural changes and loss of brain synapses lead to rapid decline in cognitive health.

he solution is still unclear, however the good news is that the human brain has a greater degree of plasticity than scientists previously believed, and new studies, specifically those made in nutritional research, show that magnesium deficiency in adults may play a more important role in CI, and more seriously, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), than previously thought.

The results of one medically significant study spearheaded by Dr. Guosong Liu, one of the world’s leading cognitive health researchers, suggest that elevation of brain magnesium through dietary intake of magnesium threonate exerts substantial positive effects on brain synapes in a mouse model of AD, actually restoring aging brains to their youthful conditions. The study is the first to show a mechanism for reversing cognitive decline in advanced stage AD mice, and is also the first to show an effective long-term treatment in AD mice.* More exciting, though, are the implications of this study for the potential for treating AD in humans.

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