Alzheimer’s disease, discovered by Alois Alzheimer in a woman in her 50s in 1906 that showed symptoms of hallucination and progressive dementia before dying at 55, has now become the 6th leading cause of deaths in the United States. On post-mortem, it was found that cerebral cortex was unusually thinner and senile plaque and neuro-fibrillary tangles, which were supposed to be protein beta-amyloid, were also found in the brain. The clumps of beta-amyloid, it was assumed, cluster together and harm nerve cells in the brain causing memory loss. So, the approach and all subsidiary efforts of the medical science had been to stop clumping in the brain, which, unfortunately, has not yielded any results. The research, it seems, has not only hit the roadblock but also has disheartened the medical community to the extent that they are now abandoning the very hypothesis of plaques formed by beta-amyloids. It’s exactly when the patients and their loved ones seek some alternative approaches to such untreatable and, eventually, a terminal disorder, which can be extremely painful and taxing to the family members.
It will not be overstatement that the symptoms such as cognitive decline, memory loss, and the erratic behavior which mark Alzheimer’s disease can significantly be delayed, if not cured, by using wonder herb, the neural tonic — Bacopa! The Ayurvedic researchers Milap, Vidyabalan ,Madhavan and others have medically proved in controlled trials the efficacy of BM to slow down degeneration effect of the disease.
Likewise, in an another research, ‘Choudhary’, ‘Tiwari’ and ‘Sharma’(2017) in their research paper while studying Ayurvedic medicine Medha Rasayan ( a famous traditional Ayurvedic medicine) pointed out that Bacopa (BM)plays pivotal role in promoting free radical scavenger mechanism. Anatomically speaking, Bacopa (BM) protects prefrontal cortex, hippocampus and striatum against toxicity and DNA damage.
