Bacopa monnieri is a popular ingredient in many nootropic products and is used primarily for its ability to improve memory. An Ayurvedic herb native to India and Australia, bacopa seems to have been first written about over 1,400 years ago, where it was used to improve various aspects of cognition (1). In modern times, scientific studies have confirmed these pro-cognitive effects of bacopa in a variety of populations, ranging from health young students to the elderly.
Unlike some nootropics that have acute effects, bacopa is something that seems to work best when taken daily for several weeks, as we will see in the discussion of the studies below. The two most common bacopa extracts used in studies are Bacognize and Synapsa/KeenMind/CDRI-08 (these three are the same thing). Dosing for both of these extracts is typically 300mg/day, often split into two 150mg doses. One paper states that KeenMind is standardized for 55% bacosides, based on spectrophotometry (2), and another claims it’s a 25: 1 extract, while another claims 20:1, which would make the 300mg/day dose roughly equivalent to 6-7.5g of dried herb. Bacognize, on the other hand, is standardized for 45% bacosides using a UV spectrophotometer, and was found to have 11.38% of the four bacosides using HPLC (3). Elsewhere, a different studied extract with a 10:1 yield was found to have 5% bacosides (HPLC) (4). So if HPLC is ~1/4 of UV (based on Bacognize’s numbers), then the 55% from CDRI would be roughly 13% HPLC, give or take. And if that’s a 20-25:1 extract, that means you have roughly 0.5-0.65% bacosides in the dried herb. Compare that to the 10:1 extract with 5% HPLC, and you get 0.5% in the dried herb, which checks out.
Dosing:
300mg/day of an extract standardized for ~40-50% bacosides (UV-spectrophotomety) or ~10% bacosides (HPLC). Bacognize or Synapsa/KeenMind/CDRI-08 fit this bill and are well-studied extracts. If using an unstandardized extract, a dose equivalent to 6g of dried powders can be used, although a standardized extract is a better assurance of potency.
Time to Work:
Improvements in memory have been noted as early as 6 weeks in one study, while another study noted benefits at 12 weeks, but not 5 weeks, and a third noting benefits at 8 weeks but not 4, suggesting that the memory enhancing benefits of bacopa take several weeks to manifest. Elsewhere, there have been mixed results on whether bacopa has acute effects, but the consensus is that it is best taken daily for several weeks. Interestingly, one study noted that, after 12 weeks of daily use, benefits persisted 4 weeks after cessation of use.
Studies:
300mg/day Bacognize given to medical students for 6 weeks was able to improve neuropsychological measures of efficiency of attention, freedom from distractibility, and working memory (5).
300mg KeenMind given to adults (mean age 41.6 years) for 90 days was able to improve special working memory accuracy by 5.9%, compared to 2.4% with placebo, and improve working memory CDR factor scores by 3%, compared to 0.6% with placebo (6).
300-450mg KeenMind given to healthy adults (age 40-65 years) for 12 weeks was able to increase the number of pairs of words remembered after a delay by 1.44 pairs (164% increase), compared to 0.82 pairs (139% increase) with placebo (7).
300mg/day KeenMind given to healthy volunteers (aged 18-60) was found to improve information processing, verbal learning, and memory consolidation after 12 weeks, but not 5 weeks (8).
Acute BM supplementation (320 or 640mg KeenMind) produced some adaptogenic and nootropic effects (healthy individuals, age 18-44 years) (9), but apparently 300mg KeenMind didn’t have any acute effects on cognitive functioning in healthy people (age 18-60 years) (10).
References:
1: Neuropharmacological Review of the Nootropic Herb Bacopa monnieri
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23958194/?i=5&from=/12404571/related
6: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18683852
7: https://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v27/n2/pdf/1395862a.pdf
8: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11498727/
