Drink tea for improved cognitive skills and brain health

Beijing: Tea lovers may now cheer up as a new study has suggested that consuming the beverage on a regular basis may not only act as an energy booster and make you feel relaxed but also improve cognitive skills and brain health.

Tea is consumed in diverse ways, with brewed tea and products with a tea ingredient extremely prevalent in Asia, especially in China and Japan. In a study, published in the journal Impact Journals LLC, researchers found that individual constituents of tea were related to the roles of maintaining cognitive abilities and preventing cognitive decline.

Meanwhile, another study with behavioural and neurophysiological measures showed that there was a degraded effect or no effect when a constituent was administered alone and a significant effect was observed only when constituents were combined.

"Tea has been a popular beverage since antiquity, with records referring to consumption dating back to the dynasty of Shen Nong (approximately 2700 BC) in China," said lead researcher Dr. Junhua Li from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

For the study, the team of researchers recruited healthy older participants to two groups according to their history of tea drinking frequency and investigated both functional and structural networks to reveal the role of tea drinking on brain organisation.

They also found that tea also helps in warding off Alzheimers -- a chronic neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and gradually worsens over time.

"In summary, our study comprehensively investigated the effects of tea drinking on brain connectivity at both global and regional scales using multi-modal imaging data and provided the first compelling evidence that tea drinking positively contributes to brain structure making network organization more efficient," Li added.