Folic Acid and DHA to Improve Mild Cognitive Impairment

The TLDR:

• Physical therapists help to manage those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) through exercise, patient education, caregiver support, and more.
• Certain nutrients and phytochemicals may help to improve memory in older adults
• A new study highlights some of the benefits of supplementing with DHA and Folic Acid...check out our video for more details!

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Photo by Darina Belonogova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-drinking-her-medications-7208641/  

Transcript:

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Dr. Wells with Nutritional Physical Therapy. I'm here with a research update and I'm excited because CSM is coming up and I hope you're gonna be there because I plan to be there and if you are shoot me a message and Maybe we can connect for a nice coffee or a Mediterranean meal.

Anyhow, this research update today is by Bai et al. It's B-A-I in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease Reports The title is Cognitive Function after Stopping Folic Acid and DHA Intervention and Extended Follow-up Results from a Randomized Double Blind Placebo Controlled Trial in Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment. It's a mouthful, but we as physical therapists and healthcare providers we deal with MCI or Mild Cognitive Impairment quite a bit.

I know in my practice I deal with it a lot and we focus a lot on lifestyle interventions. Sleep, exercise, diet. These are huge.

So very exciting to see this new publication come out and the prior randomized controlled trial they published on Mild Cognitive Impairment showed some improvements in supplementation with folic acid So that could be promising and sure enough from this study They found that supplementing with both folic acid and DHA Improved parameters of mild cognitive impairment. Now It should be noted that both groups that were followed in the study those that were on the placebo and those that were on the actual supplement Intervention had cognitive and decline over the six-month period of the intervention or placebo intervention, right? Well, what's notable is that those that were taking the folic acid and the DHA Had a significantly less Decline in their overall cognitive functioning. And so what they found also what I thought was interesting is their serum amyloid beta peptide, which is a marker of Possibly cognitive impairment, right? So we see those are sometimes increased in those that have Alzheimer's and other types of dementia And homocysteine were also decreased when they had this folic acid and DHA Intervention on board.

Now, is this surprising? Probably not like we know that DHA is very good for the brain We always talk about that and we highlight this on our courses quite a bit Omega-3s in particular EPA tends to be very cardio protective whereas DHA tends to be more brain protective so not a significant surprise with that now the folic acid definitely seems more surprising and more sort of interesting and The notion that homocysteine has gone down also could be related to that that folic acid possibly reducing some of that background inflammation, so Interestingly enough six months after those individuals started the supplementation Their brains and their decline went pretty much back to where what they would expect it to be So in other words, the authors suggest that maybe this folic acid and DHA supplementation has some teeth some legs in it We obviously need more research particularly for those with Alzheimer's. We need more information on this But this could be something that we as physical therapists and neuro neuro inclined rehab specialists Should be keeping an eye on for those that have mild cognitive impairment Overall, the risk of supplementing with DHA is pretty low and it's pretty common within a lot of individuals taking fish supplements For instance, for instance folic acid. We know there's really strong evidence for it for those that For prenatal vitamins and for those that are pregnant.

So the overall risk with that supplements also fairly low, too I'm not huge in supplementation for the most part, but this is definitely promising and Hopefully we'll see more from it. Anyhow, if you like this content like subscribe CSM's coming up like I mentioned if you like nutrition there will be nutrition content there But nothing like our three-part course three-part course series. So check that out sign up today.

Have a great one