There is good news for individuals who like to sip in a cup or two of tea every day as a study says people who drink tea have better-organized brain regions compared to non-tea drinkers.
According to the study, drinking tea every day improves brain health and its efficiency as those who consume either green tea, black tea, or oolong tea at least four times a week for about 25 years have some regions of their brain more efficiently interconnected and better organized.
"Our study offers the first evidence of the positive contribution of tea drinking to brain structure and suggests a protective effect on age-related decline in brain organization," said the lead author of the study published in the journal Aging.
Researchers at the National University of Singapore, Wuyi University in China, the University of Essex, and the University of Cambridge, in the study assessed 36 adults over the age of 60 years in a comparison of tea drinkers with non-tea drinkers to find that those who drank tea had more efficiently interconnected regions than those who did not.
"Take the analogy of road traffic as an example -- consider brain regions as destinations, while the connections between brain regions are roads. When a road system is better organized, the movement of vehicles and passengers is more efficient and uses fewer resources. Similarly, when the connections between brain regions are more structured, information processing can be performed more efficiently," explained Assistant Professor Feng Lei.
"If you have a strongly interconnected brain, you also have a healthy cognitive function," Lei said.
He continued that his research relating to brain network indirectly supported the team's previous findings that tea drinking was associated with better cognitive functioning by showing the positive effects of regular drinking were the result of improved brain organization brought about by preventing disruption to interregional connections.
The results are an addition to several other benefits of tea drinking, including prevention from antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to another study, which says drinking green tea helped to combat antibiotic resistance, apart from fighting cancer and heart attack.
