Magda Tsolaki
The continuously growing elderly population is leading to an increased prevalence of age-related disorders, such as Subjective Cognitive Impairment (SCI), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and dementias. No conventional or alternative therapy is currently available and approved to treat and cure SCI, MCI and dementia patients, so it is important to study the benefit of alternative medicines or plants on cognitive, behavioral and functional performance. The discovery of new natural compounds with neuroactive properties has gained much attention recently for the management of neurodegenerative diseases. There is a rich literature about preclinical studies, but also there are many randomized clinical trials during the last decade, which suggest that some kinds of our every day food can help us to keep our cognition at a very good level. Some of them are for elderly people who have no cognitive problems (pomegranate juice, curcumin, walnuts, flavonoid-rich apples, nitrate-rich spinach, chronic blueberry supplementation, etc), other for patients with SCI (fish oil, blueberry, etc), other for people with MCI (Crocus Sativus, Extra Virgin Olive oil, grape juice supplementation, mushroom Yamabushitake -Hericium erinaceus-, etc) and other for Dementia patients (Cinnamon, Crocus sativus, mushroom Yamabushitake -Hericium erinaceus-, fish and polyunsaturated fatty acids, etc). Also Cannabiodiol is also a promising agent not only for cognition but also for behavioral problems which are usual in patients with dementia. Our suggestion is the use of all the mentioned foods in our every day life in doses that showed in the above clinical studies that are useful for our cognition and wait for new randomized clinical studies which will combine all the above foods and even more to see if the combination of them (Cognition Diet-CogniDi) has a better result.
