Can Drinking Red Wine Slow The Effects Of Dementia?

Add "improving your memory" to the growing list of health benefits associated with drinking red wine. A new study published by researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles hypothesizes that resveratrol, the good stuff found in red wine, is associated with fighting the negative effects of Alzheimer's, dementia, and other regenerative neurological illnesses.

The study was not wide-ranging by any means, and only studied the cognitive effects of red wine on five men and women between the ages of 66 and 82 who had mild memory and dementia issues. The group was divided in half: a placebo group and one that consumed freeze-dried powder made from California wine grapes, containing a quantity of resveratrol approximately equal to that in a glass-and-a-half of red wine. The research team found that the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits of resveratrol helped to stimulate activity in the brain.

"Each region participates in different cognitive abilities," explained Dr. Daniel Silverman, head of the Neuronuclear Imaging Section at UCLA and the lead author of the study, according to Wine Spectator. "We looked at regions of the brain that we knew [activity] would go down if a person was in the early stages of memory decline due to something like Alzheimer's."