Prognosis

Chinese Soup Ingredients May Hold Key to Fighting Dementia

  • Traditional plant mix to enter advanced clinical test in China
  • Drug may be first specific treatment for vascular dementia
Inside the laboratory at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences’ Xiyuan Hospital.Photographer: Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg
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The ingredients in this experimental brain treatment may be better known to enhance cooking, not cognition.

Chinese scientists have borrowed three ingredients from the country’s traditional medicine practice -- a 3,000-year-old approach that aims to regulate the flow of energy in the body -- and used modern pharmaceutical technology to devise a formula to tackle dementia, which has no cure.