Fisetin As A Memory Enhancer

Scott: Doctor, could you talk about some recent studies and the results of those that have come out on Fisetin?

Dr. Puya Yazdi: Okay, no problem.  So there's actually been a couple studies that are very important, that were done on Fisetin.  They're really the reason that we, and I strongly believe that this has real potential to decrease cognitive decline.  They both came out of the Salk Institute, and Dr. Maher was the lead researcher on both of those studies.  One of them got published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Now for someone listening listening who goes, "What's the big deal about that?"

Well, the big deal about that is that's the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which is considered the most prestigious sort of society in the scientific community in the United States.  It's very prestigious.  If you're an American scientist, your goal eventually is to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences.  It's about as prestigious as you can get, outside of winning something like a Nobel prize.  And so they have a journal that they put out, which is probably one of the four or five best scientific journals in the world, called the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study that basically showed that Fisetin through different mechanisms can potentiate long-term memory enhancement, more than passes any kind of snuff test of the scientific community.  The scientific community got very excited from Dr. Maher's work that showed that basically, Fisetin is able to act as a nootropic agent.  What we mean by that is, it's a memory enhancer.  The reason this makes sense is if you, through these different mechanisms, are preventing age-related cognitive decline, preventing cellular death, and increasing the ability to take undifferentiated cells and make them into new neurons, you're increasing the ability to form long-term memories and new memories.

Basically, you're turning an aging brain into a much younger brain.  And so that's where I think a lot of the excitement in the scientific community about Fisetin is coming from; you've got a couple of really good research articles just published in the last 5 years which show that on a molecular level, and in vivo, that this has real potential.  And it looks like it does actually prevent age-related decline, and it does actually increase long-term memory enhancement.