Choline to reduce your chance of Alzheimer's.

Increase your daily intake of choline, reduce your chance of Alzheimer’s

Supplementation with a few grams of choline per day, or a diet with more natural sources of choline, may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. American researchers at Arizona State University formulate this hypothesis based on their experiments with mice.

Choline
Choline is a precursor of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. It is also a building block of cell membranes. An egg yolk contains 150 milligrams of choline, a 200-gram piece of beef, 110 milligrams, a cup of canned kidney beans 90 milligrams, and a portion of Brussels sprouts of 65 milligrams.

Study
The Americans experimented with APP/PS1 mice, which have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease. They also did tests with regular Non-Tg mice.

Half of the two groups of mice received food with extra choline from the age of two to the age of eleven [Ch+]. If the mice were adult humans, they would have received a supplement containing 2-3 grams of choline every day.

The maximum amount of choline that people can consume daily for a long time is 3.5 grams per day.

The other mice received standard food.

When the mice were 10 months old, and you would expect that at least the APP / PS1 mice had developed Alzheimer’s, the researchers placed the test animals in an aquarium for a few days in a row. Just below the surface of the water a plateau was hidden somewhere in the aquarium, and the researchers looked at how long it took the mice to find it.

Results
The APP/PS1 mice that had received choline found the plateau just as fast as the regular mice. Choline supplementation had no effect on regular mice.

When the APP/PS1 mice were 10 months old, the researchers looked into the brains of the animals. They discovered that choline supplementation had inhibited the growth of the plaques.

Conclusion
“If these results generalize to humans, the adjustment to a choline supplemented diet throughout life may mitigate the estimated increased prevalence observed for Alzheimer’s disease”, the researchers summarize.

“Given that we found beneficial effects of lifelong choline supplemented in nondiseased aged mice, this type of intervention may be beneficial for the general population, thereby providing substantial benefits to offset age related pathologies.”

Source: Aging Cell. 2019 Sep 27:e13037. doi: 10.1111/acel.13037. [Epub ahead of print].