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Improvement in cognition following double-blind randomized micronutrient interventions in the general population
Denniss, Barker, and Day (2019) recruited 60 healthy adults (age 21-59) and randomly assigned the individuals into 3 groups (vitamin D supplement, multivitamin administration, or taking vitamin C), with all supplements to be taken for 8 weeks in order to determine their effect on cognitive function. A 14-day food diary was taken to gather data on micronutrient intake, while the cognitive test battery included measures from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III), Wechsler Memory Scale-IV (WMS-IV), Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS), the Doors and People, and a serial reaction time task. The results showed improvements in performance in some tasks for all the groups following the intervention period, notably on measures of verbal and visual memory and visuomotor processing speed. The multivitamin group showed significantly greater results than before the supplementation on tasks of visual strategy generation (along with the Vitamin C group), motor planning, explicit and implicit learning, and working memory. Denniss et al. (2019) claimed that their findings suggest that sub-optimal micronutrient intake may have a negative effect on cognition across the lifespan. [NPID: cognition, vitamin D, vitamin C, multivitamin, micronutrients, verbal memory, working memory, processing speed]
Year: 2019
