Senior study author Prof. Mahmoud Salami, from Kashan University in Iran, and colleagues recently published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
Probiotics are defined as live microorganisms that are "helpful" to human health. These include bacterial groups such as Lactobacillusand Bifidobacterium, as well as yeasts, including Saccharomyces boulardii.
According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, probiotics can act in a number of ways. They can help create a favorable community of microbes in the gut, for example, and help stimulate immune response.
Compared with participants who consumed the untreated milk, those who received the probiotic-enriched milk demonstrated significant improvements in cognitive functioning, the team reports.
Subjects who consumed the treated milk saw average MMSE scores increase from 8.7 to 10.6 (out of a possible 30) during the 12-week study period, while scores dropped from 8.5 to 8.0 for those who drank the untreated milk.
The researchers stress that all participants remained severely cognitively impaired, but their findings are the first to show that probiotics might lead to some cognitive improvements.
"In a previous study, we showed that probiotic treatment improves the impaired spatial learning and memory in diabetic rats," notes Prof. Salami, "but this is the first time that probiotic supplementation has been shown to benefit cognition in cognitively impaired humans."