Just as “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” the benefits of a healthy diet in preventing debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are well known. Patients with AD suffer from drastic cognitive decline as the disease progresses, which affects their quality of life. Given that a certain diet could potentially alleviate Alzheimer’s disease symptoms, could spice play a beneficial role too? This possibility has fired up a group of Chinese researchers!
According to a new study published in Chinese Medical Journal on 20 January 2021, Chinese scientists from Third Military Medical University, Qingdao University, and Fudan University have identified an interesting link between consumption of spicy food and the levels of biomarkers associated with AD. “We investigated whether spicy food consumption is associated with cognition and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers of AD in the Chinese population.”, explains Dr. Yan-Jiang Wang, the corresponding author of the study,
The team performed two parallel studies – one “case-control” study with equal numbers of patients with AD and individuals who were “cognitively normal” (CN); and another “cohort” study with double the number of individuals without AD. They assessed spicy food consumption using a Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) that indicated the consumption frequency of a finite number of spicy food items by these individuals, during the period of assessment.
They also performed a Mini-Mental Status Examination, the scores of which determined if the assessed individual had no, mild, moderate, or severe cognitive impairment. Finally, they compared the FFQ results with the levels of AD related biomarkers in these individuals.
Interestingly, in the case-control study, the scientists observed that patients with AD consumed less spicy food, compared to individuals deemed CN. Also, they found that FFQ scores positively correlated with MMSE scores, implying that consumption of spicy food can alter the cognitive state and may serve as a preventive strategy against cognitive decline. Their findings were bolstered by similar results from the cohort study. Higher scores were also associated with higher levels of b-amyloid (Ab42), a well-known biomarker of AD, but negatively associated with phospho-tau/Ab42 and total tau/Ab42 ratios, in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of assessed individuals.