Update on sage use to slow cognitive decline

My 78-year-old mother wants me to blog about this subject again to report on how it's going, so I dutifully do so. (I first posted about this subject seven months ago at http://petticoatgovernment.blogspot.com/2018/08/sage-caspase-3-and-possible-cognitive.html.)

She has been adding the culinary herb sage--usually on soup, but sometimes in homemade bread--to her diet on and off for months. She has noticed a marked decrease in her short-term memory loss after periods during which she has been consistent in her sage consumption. While I am very pleased to have my intelligent mother back to her usual conversational abilities, I didn't want to blog about it beforehand because correlation is not the same as causation. After all, it could have been that her memory happened to be better sometimes and it was during those times that she remembered to eat the sage.

My mother has been firm in saying for the past few weeks that sage causes her memory to be better. So I told two other post-menopausal women who had been complaining about memory loss.  One woman had very noticeable memory issues a few weeks ago, so I gave her a container of sage; it cost me only $1.00 at the grocery store. Two days ago, I sat in a meeting with her, and her memory issues appeared to have nearly completely receded. At the end of the evening, I asked her if she had been using sage. I was hoping, of course, that the experiment with sage was bearing fruit. She dashed my hopes initially by saying she wasn't using it nearly enough...then she finished her answer saying, "just once a day." Once a day! My mother laughed hard when she heard that, for once a day is very consistent use in her book.

I'll check with the third woman and see if she is also trying sage and demonstrating improvement in her memory issues. If so, I'll go do some more research on how sage might be helping. Is it by inhibition of caspase-3? Is it by inhibition of lipase, alpha-amylase, and/or alpha-glucosidase? Or something else?