Blackmores Institute

“Based on these findings, 10 mg lutein consumption for twelve months can lead to improvement of visual episodic memory performance in young and middle-aged adults and improvement of inhibition performance in middle-aged and older adults.
 
 When compared to a placebo control group, researchers found that the intake of lutein benefitted several cognitive functions, such as: visual episodic memory, verbal episodic memory, inhibition and attention, with these results suggesting that consumption of lutein would have a positive effect on cognitive functions in healthy adults.
 
 In the studies that measured attention, the review found that despite inconsistent results, there is a possibility that lutein consumption would improve attention performance because individuals with increased macular pigment optical density (MPOD) levels showed improved attention performance compared to those young adults where there was no increase.
 
 “Several studies reported the significant correlation between cognitive functions (such as macular pigment (MP) and serum lutein(SL)) and carotenoid concentration. Previous cohort studies demonstrated the significant correlation between the MP and SL and a wide range of cognitive functions including visual episodic memory, inhibition, and attention in middle-aged and older adults and the current results of this systematic review are consistent with these cohort studies,” the authors explained.
 
 The study explained that lutein and its isomers can cross the blood-brain barrier and therefore their anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory functions would directly act in the human brain. In addition, lutein is selectively distributed in the frontal cortex, visual cortex and hippocampus with concentrations levels of lutein and its isomers in the prefrontal cortex higher than that in other regions. According to the review, these results suggest that lutein and its isomer would affect the memory and inhibition related brain regions.
 
 While the researchers also attempted to examine the benefits of astaxanthin on cognitive function the low number of studies did not permit any conclusions to be drawn. However, they did note that there is a possibility that astaxanthin has a positive effect on cognitive function based on the results of the two studies they reviewed.
 
 The authors also suggest that it is not easy to take enough lutein and astaxanthin to affect cognitive functions from daily consumption and that the supplementation of lutein or astaxanthin led to improvements of cognitive function in the randomised controlled trials.
 
 “We firstly conducted the systematic review for randomised controlled trials to investigate the benefits of carotenoids intakes on cognitive functions. The systematic review revealed that lutein selectively leads to improvement of visual episodic memory in young and middle-aged adults and inhibition in the middle-aged and older adults, indicating that carotenoid (lutein and astaxanthin) would have positive impacts on cognitive functions among different age groups,” the authors concluded.
 
 Source:
 Nutrients. 2020. DOI: <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/3/617">10.3390/nu12030617</a>

The benefits of carotenoids in several chronic health disorders are well known, however, a new systematic review finds that lutein (and its isomers) also have significant benefits for cognitive function.

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