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Medical AI Inquiry: You was designed to assist in medical decision-making based on the provided user questions. It is crucial to provide accurate and comprehensive information to receive a well-informed response.  Labels: BACKGROUND, OBJECTIVE, RESULTS. Meshes: Aging, Animals, Blotting, Western, Blueberry Plants, Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, Cognition Disorders, Flavonoids, Fruit, Gene Expression Regulation, Hippocampus, Male, Memory, RNA, Messenger, Rats, Rats, Inbred Strains, Spatial Behavior.
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Does blueberry supplementation induce spatial memory improvements and region-specific regulation of hippocampal BDNF mRNA expression in young rats? Context: Flavonoid-rich foods have been shown to be able to reverse age-related cognitive deficits in memory and learning in both animals and humans. However, to date, there have been only a limited number of studies investigating the effects of flavonoid-rich foods on cognition in young/healthy animals. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of a blueberry-rich diet in young animals using a spatial working memory paradigm, the delayed non-match task, using an eight-arm radial maze. Furthermore, the mechanisms underlying such behavioural effects were investigated. We show that a 7-week supplementation with a blueberry diet (2 % w/w) improves the spatial memory performance of young rats (2 months old). Blueberry-fed animals also exhibited a faster rate of learning compared to those on the control diet. These behavioural outputs were accompanied by the activation of extracellular signal-related kinase (ERK1/2), increases in total cAMP-response element-binding protein (CREB) and elevated levels of pro- and mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the hippocampus. Changes in hippocampal CREB correlated well with memory performance. Further regional analysis of BDNF gene expression in the hippocampus revealed a specific increase in BDNF mRNA in the dentate gyrus and CA1 areas of hippocampi of blueberry-fed animals.
assistant
The present study suggests that consumption of flavonoid-rich blueberries has a positive impact on spatial learning performance in young healthy animals, and these improvements are linked to the activation of ERK-CREB-BDNF pathway in the hippocampus. Final Decision: yes