Seaweed: food against dementia?

When we age our blood vessels function deteriorates, worsening blood supply and causing leakage of
inflammatory substances to the brain. This is accompanied by loss of neuronal cells. Both processes might be linked to each other. Also, both processes play a role in dementia, a progressive loss of brain cognitive and memory function which affects an ever growing percentage of our aging population. Currently, there are no therapies to prevent or slow down dementia caused by aging of blood vessels and neuronal tissue. The impact therapies would be enormous: on vascular aging-based diseases only, already 18 million people die per year, and healthcare costs the EU a staggering €210 billion. Dementia patients absorb a large part of this sum.

This project will investigate if food containing seaweed components that slow down Alzheimer’s Disease, a different form of dementia, can improve dementia caused by aging. The project will be a collaboration between Erasmus MC vascular aging and dementia experts and The Seaweed Company, a small enterprise that exploits locally grown seaweed species for consumption on the basis of durable agricultural techniques.