Fish has been cited to boost memory in many trials and now a team from the University of Alberta has explored how. Basically, an ingredient called DHA, which is a kind of omega-3 fatty acid seen in fish, comes into play here.
A research was conducted with 2 groups of animal prototypes, one which was fed a high-DHA diet and the other that consumed healthy food. As per the results, mice with high amount of DHA intakes apparently carried high proportions of DHA in their hippocampi. This was not the case with rats on regular diets.
Yves Sauve, a medical researcher at the University of Alberta, commented, “We wanted to find out how fish intake improves memory. What we discovered is that memory cells in the hippocampus could communicate better with each other and better relay messages when DHA levels in that region of the brain were higher. This could explain why memory improves on a high-DHA diet.”
The high proportions of DHA in certain brain areas seemed to improve the interaction between memory cells in those regions. This is possibly one of the major reasons why a high DHA diet is known to enhance memory.
The scientists found that consuming fish supplements could increase the collection of DHA in the required brain portions, which could seemingly preserve memory in old age. It also has other potential health benefits, going by a recent analysis which showed how a combination of curry spice and DHA could improve walking abilities among people suffering from spinal cord injury.