Cerebral Blood Flow Research Analysis

Cerebral Blood Flow

Research analysis led by Kamal Patel.
All content reviewed by the Examine.com Team. Published: Feb 6, 2013
Last Updated: Apr 29, 2017

Neural Blood Flow

The Human Effect Matrix looks at human studies (it excludes animal and in vitro studies) to tell you what supplements affect cerebral blood flow

Grade	Level of Evidence [show legend]
	Robust research conducted with repeated double-blind clinical trials
	Multiple studies where at least two are double-blind and placebo controlled
	Single double-blind study or multiple cohort studies
	Uncontrolled or observational studies only

Outcome	Magnitude of effect ? The direction and size of the supplement's impact on each outcome. Some supplements can have an increasing effect, others have a decreasing effect, and others have no effect.	Consistency of research results ? Scientific research does not always agree. HIGH or VERY HIGH means that most of the scientific research agrees.	Notes
Marijuana	Minor	- See all 3 studies	Both increases and decreases seem to have been reported over the whole brain, and it seems that in people who do not experience orthostatic hypotension from marijuana it is generally an increase; blood flow to the ACC in particular is increased following THC, but this becomes a decrease during tolerance.
Cocoa Extract	Minor	- See study	Cerebral blood flow during cognitive testing in youth can be increased from 170mg cocoa flavanols, although may not coexist with increases in cognition.
Fish Oil	Minor	- See study	Appears to improve cerebral blood flow and volume in persons with low dietary fish intake
Ginkgo biloba
Green Tea Catechins
Polypodium leucotomos
Resveratrol
Melatonin
Yohimbine

All comparative evidence is now gathered in our A-to-Z Supplement Reference.

The evidence for each separate supplement is still freely available here.