We normally think of the effects of diabetes in terms of cardiovascular damage, blindness, limb amputations, and so forth.
But research now shows that it can affect your memory, too.
However, it’s not that diabetes affects your memory that’s the biggest news, but rather, how. Because it’s in a very strange way.
And there is an easy way to deal with this.
A new study published in the July 2016 edition of the journal Epidemiology and Community Health, American scientists demonstrated that high blood sugar in elderly people worsened their episodic memory.
Episodic memories are memories of an event in which you participated in the recent or distant past. It always includes a connection to yourself.
For example, if you remember last Wednesday’s lunch or your 21st birthday party, these are episodic memories. Or, if you remember approximately how, where, and when you learned the difference between different types of pigeons, it is also an episodic memory. If you only remember the differences between pigeons without remembering where and when you learned it, that memory is semantic rather than episodic. The connection to yourself in a specific time and place is the defining factor.
These memories are established and stored in the hippocampus and in the left prefrontal cortex.
The researchers analyzed data from 4,419 older adults previously collected in the Health and Retirement Study. At the beginning of the study, their average age was 72.66 and 58 percent of them were women. 950 of them had diabetes and 3,469 did not.
At the beginning of the study, they underwent blood tests, after which their memory was tested repeatedly over the following six years.
The scientists estimated the severity of their diabetes by looking at their hemoglobin A1C levels.
Participants with the highest A1C levels at the beginning of the study achieved the lowest scores on the first memory test, and their memories also declined faster than those of the people with lower A1C scores did.
In other words, the higher your blood sugar, the worse your memory, and the faster your memory deteriorates.
It’s therefore essential for your brain health to lower your blood sugar and reverse type 2 diabetes.
If you’re already suffering memory loss, click here for a simple method that boosts your brain with it’s most essential ingredients and reverses memory decline…