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A promising finding

A single dose of cortisol was enough to dull recall within the hour

Forty healthy adults took 10mg of cortisol and an hour later recalled facts worse than adults on placebo. Older adults whose cortisol stayed high across five years had a smaller memory hub.

Cortisol

Feeling scattered under stress gets filed as a mood. The hormone does it on its own: forty adults given one 10mg dose of cortisol recalled facts and handled space worse an hour later than adults on placebo, while memory for how to do things held. Older adults whose cortisol stayed high across five years had a smaller hippocampus, the brain's memory hub. That half is a correlation in a small elderly group, and the evidence of damage comes from rats. Minutes are proven; years are a pattern.

The findings behind this

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Mental & cognitiveIn one trial, a single dose of cortisol dulled recall for facts

Forty healthy adults took 10 mg of cortisol. An hour later they recalled facts and handled space worse than people on placebo. Memory for how to do things was untouched.

★★☆Single study — solid evidence, such as one good trial or a large observational dataset, but not replicated at the top tier.Forty people took the dose, and each took it once, so this shows what one sharp rise does rather than what months of raised cortisol do. The loss was confined to recalling facts and handling space, which leaves much of what memory does unaffected.Click to keep this openFocus and think clearlyCortisol
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Mental & cognitiveThe memory hub was smaller in older adults whose cortisol stayed high

Cortisol stayed high across five years in some older adults. Their hippocampus was smaller and their memory scores worse. Nothing here shows the cortisol caused it.

★★☆Single study — solid evidence, such as one good trial or a large observational dataset, but not replicated at the top tier.The group was small and elderly, and the published summary never says how many people were in it. In humans this is a correlation; the evidence that cortisol itself damages the structure comes from the rat work the same paper cites. Ageing or illness could equally shrink that structure and raise cortisol at once, which would draw this same pattern with no link between them.Click to keep this openFocus and think clearlyCortisol

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