The impact of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids on cognition in the elderly
O3PUFAs demonstrate their potential as an inexpensive, low-risk nutritional therapy that may one day help to prevent age-related cognitive decline
As the world’s population ages, clinicians are continuing to search for ways to best promote brain health and help patients stave off such cognitive disorders as Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.
Studies have shown that diet has a significant impact on the ageing brain, but the relationship between actual biomarkers of diet and the health of specific brain tissue has been a mystery.
Given the proven positive effect of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (O3PUFAs) on brain health, a research team from the University of Illinois sought to discover if and how higher levels of O3PUFAs affect executive functions of the brain. The results of their work were published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
Executive functions are concerned with planning, reasoning and judgment and find their literal home in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the brain. For the purposes of this study, researchers narrowed executive function to cognitive flexibility and the PFC to the anterior cingulate cortex to tease out the neural mechanism responsible for mediating the relationship.
As their study cohort, they chose cognitively intact older adults who were found to be at risk of developing age-related cognitive disorders. 'At risk' older adults were defined as such if they possessed the apolipoprotein e4 (APOE e4) allele, which is associated with a greater risk of developing age-related cognition issues and which was determined by genotype testing.
Ultimately, 40 adults between the ages of 65 and 75 years who tested positive for the APOE e4 polymorphism were studied. These participants underwent the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System Trail Making Test to discern their cognitive flexibility, and their grey matter volume within regions of the PFC was measured via magnetic resonance imaging.
The results of this study were multilayered, but most significantly, they confirmed (1) that the relationship between O3PUFA biomarkers and cognitive flexibility was mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex and (2) that higher O3PUFA levels were marginally associated with better cognitive flexibility.
Certainly, more research is warranted, but in this study, O3PUFAs demonstrated their potential as an inexpensive, low-risk nutritional therapy that may one day help to prevent age-related cognitive decline.
