New Delhi (NVI): The daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during adolescence impairs performance on a learning and memory task during adulthood, according to a new research conducted by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University of Southern California.
The research group has also shown that changes in the bacteria in the gut may be the key to sugar-induced memory impairment.
However, less is known about how high sugar consumption during childhood affects the development of the brain, specifically a region known to be critically important for learning and memory called the hippocampus.
The findings of the study were published in the journal ‘Translational Psychiatry’.
According to the latest findings, similar memory deficits were observed even when the bacteria, called Parabacteroides, were experimentally enriched in the guts of animals that had never consumed sugar.
“Early life sugar increased Parabacteroides levels, and the higher the levels of Parabacteroides, the worse the animals did in the task,” said Emily Noble, assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences who served as first author on the paper.
She added, “We found that the bacteria alone was sufficient to impair memory in the same way as sugar, but it also impaired other types of memory functions as well.”
Considering the role the hippocampus plays in a variety of cognitive functions and the fact the area is still developing into late adolescence, researchers sought to understand more about its vulnerability to a high-sugar diet via gut microbiota.
Juvenile rats were given their normal chow and an 11 per cent sugar solution, which is comparable to commercially available sugar-sweetened beverages.
Researchers then had the rats perform a hippocampus-dependent memory task designed to measure episodic contextual memory, or remembering the context where they had seen a familiar object before.
“We found that rats that consumed sugar in early life had an impaired capacity to discriminate that an object was novel to a specific context, a task the rats that were not given sugar were able to do,” Noble said.
A second memory task measured basic recognition memory, a hippocampal-independent memory function that involves the animals’ ability to recognize something they had seen previously.
In this task, sugar had no effect on the animals’ recognition memory.
“Early life sugar consumption seems to selectively impair their hippocampal learning and memory,” Noble said.
Additional analyses determined that high sugar consumption led to elevated levels of Parabacteroides in the gut microbiome, the more than 100 trillion microorganisms in the gastrointestinal tract that play a role in human health and disease.
To better identify the mechanism by which the bacteria impacted memory and learning, researchers experimentally increased levels of Parabacteroides in the microbiome of rats that had never consumed sugar. Those animals showed impairments in both hippocampal-dependent and hippocampal-independent memory tasks.
“The bacteria induced some cognitive deficits on its own,” Noble said.
Noble said future research is needed to better identify specific pathways by which this gut-brain signaling operates.
“The question now is how do these populations of bacteria in the gut alter the development of the brain?” Noble said.
Noble concluded, “Identifying how the bacteria in the gut are impacting brain development will tell us about what sort of internal environment the brain needs in order to grow in a healthy way.”
–PRT
