Traditional 'smart soup' shows promise in fighting Alzheimer's

A traditional Chinese medicine known as smart soup (聰明湯) could help in the fight against Alzheimer's disease, scientists on the mainland believe.

The simple treatment helped relieve and even reverse Alzheimer's symptoms in mice that had been genetically modified to acquire the disease, researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology in Shanghai found.

The rodents began to show improvements after just six days of being fed the medicine, which consists of three herbs - rhizoma acori tatarinowii（石菖蒲）, poria cum radix pini （茯神）and radix polygalae（遠志）.

The researchers believe that chemicals in the herbs both inhibit the growth of amyloid-beta, an amino acid thought responsible for Alzheimer's, and protect neurons from its effects.

Alzheimer's disease is one of the biggest threats facing the elderly - it has been diagnosed in about 30 million people across the world and that figure is expected to double every 20 years, according to the World Health Organisation. Sufferers face increasing cognitive problems including speaking impairment and memory loss.

Mice treated with the smart soup regained the ability to find hidden platforms and their memory also showed improvement, researchers said. When faced with a new object, they would explore it for significantly longer than they did before they were treated, which researchers said was evidence of improved memory.