It’s long been established that increased choline consumption can be beneficial for our liver function, but according to recent research, it could also be helpful in improving our attention span and long-term memory.
A new study, carried out by an international team of scientists, evaluated the impact of supplementing choline on our ability to pay attention and remember things. Looking at its effects on rats, they found that choline was directly involved in modulating the two.
Publishing their findings in Nutritional Neuroscience and Behavioural Brain Research respectively, the team - led by the University of Granada’s Hayarelis Moreno - revealed that the effects of supplementing with the vitamin were significant.
While Conella does not endorse animal trials, it does recognise their application and utility in human medical research, and the findings from this study are interesting. That’s because where rats were supplemented with choline during pregnancy, their offspring were found to have significantly better long-term memories than control groups.
A second experiment, performed on adult animals, returned similar results, indicating that supplementing with choline notably increased the rats’ attention spans.
The team said that this implied a long-lasting beneficial impact from supplementing with choline during pregnancy, as well as positive improvements in cognitive measures when grown animals were similarly dosed.
Experiment one
Two separate experiments were conducted as part of this study. The first looked into long-term memory and involved supplementing pregnant rats with choline during the latter third of the gestational period. The idea was to document the effects of prenatal choline on the memory processes of the offspring.
The rats were split into three groups: those supplemented with a choline-rich diet, those fed a standard diet, and those fed foodstuffs that were low in choline. The plan was to see how varying amounts of choline would impact the rats’ offspring.
Once they reached maturity, 10 female offspring from each group were selected and tested. The intention was to gauge their memory retention abilities and see whether the nutrient had any effect on this.
Research indicated that there was no difference in the rats’ abilities to remember an object 24 hours after they were first shown it, but that after 48 hours, the rats whose dams had been fed a choline-rich diet displayed superior memory retention.
Conversely, the offspring of choline-deficient animals demonstrated the poorest recall of the three groups tested.
On the basis of these findings, the scientists concluded that prenatal choline intake likely improves long-term memory capabilities in adult offspring.
Experiment two
The second experiment looked into choline’s effects on attention and learning. To gauge this, it supplemented a group of adult rats with choline for a period of 12 weeks, before testing them against a control group.
Moreno and her team found that those animals who'd been supplemented with the nutrient were better able to maintain attention and focus than their counterparts, both when presented with a familiar stimulus and when asked to learn a new meaning for it.
Interested in finding out more? Then take a look through our extensive archive. With lots of articles on choline, lecithin, memory, mental health, and more, you’ll find it an invaluable resource for refining your diet plan and tailoring it to your unique needs.
