If you are someone who always asks for salt when you are having your meal, then you should be careful. According to a study, excessive salt intake can risk you to dementia by posing a harm to your brain. Salt is a necessary ingredient for regulating some bodily functions but there have been studies which talk about excessive salt responsible for high blood pressure and the increased the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Weill Cornell Medicine in New York studied the effect of extra salt on mice and found that a high-salt diet reduced resting cerebral blood flow by 28 percent in the cortex and 25 percent in the hippocampus. These sections of the brain are responsible for learning and memory. The impaired blood flow to the brain was due to the decrease in the production of nitric oxide. "We discovered that mice fed a high-salt diet developed dementia even when blood pressure did not rise," said Costantino Iadecola, Professor at the Weill Cornell Medicine.

The study published in Nature Neuroscience says the mice were given food with 4 or 8% salt which is close to an 8-to 16-fold increase in comparison to human consumption. Those rodents which ate the high-salt diet developed dementia. They were tested on a maze, object recognition and nest and they performed very poorly on those. It was found that because of the high-salt intake, the mice’s white blood cells produced more interleukin 17 (IL-17). This protein is known to regulate immune and inflammatory responses, and reduce nitric oxide. The researchers then treated the mice with a drug called ROCK inhibitor Y27632. It helped to reduce the levels of IL-17 and also nitric oxide. The drug improved the behavioural and cognitive functions in mice, Iadecola said.

The results of the study put a highlight on the ill-effects caused to the brain by an excess of salt consumption. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), adults consume less than 5g (just under a teaspoon) of salt per day. For children and babies, salt intakes should be much lower than this. So it is important you also regulate your munching on salty chips and nuts which you may have been casually having in your breaks.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 18, 2018 01:44 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).