Rosemary for Alzheimer's

This is an article from Dementia & Alzheimer Weekly, a great resource of information.
"Rosemary contains more than a dozen antioxidants and a half-dozen compounds reported to prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine. It's fabulous that the classical herb of remembrance has so many compounds that might help people suffering from Alzheimer’s."

These are the words of Dr. James Duke, former U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Chief of Medicinal Plant Research. Dr. Duke is one of the world's leading authorities on medicinal plants. He helped build the USDA database that demonstrates how rosemary may slow the progress of Alzheimer's.

His strong advocacy of rosemary has to do with a chemical called acetylcholine. Anyone who has lived with Alzheimer’s in the past decade has heard of Aricept. Aricept is a medicine that does one thing: it inhibits acetylcholine.


So does rosemary.

Dr. Duke said that when he learned of the new medications that fought Alzheimer’s by inhibiting acetylcholine, “I probed my U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) database for herbs with phytochemical constituents that were also reported to prevent the breakdown of ACh (acetylcholine). Even though I myself had been the source of the overwhelming proportion of the data in the database for more than a decade, I was surprised at the output. The database yielded about a half dozen anti-AChE (acetylcholine) compounds, with Rosmarinus officinalis (rosemary) the proud winner in terms of their numbers and potencies.”