In the Psychology Today article Spicing Up Your Memory, it is revealed that a 2003 study involving 44 healthy young adults – not seniors suffering from memory loss – showed sage oil improves short-term memory. While this study is intriguing, I would like to know the following:

1) Would these findings hold in a much larger experimental group? Presumably only 22 of the 44 received the sage oil. That’s a small number of people on whom to base this conclusion about sage oil’s effects.

2) Was this placebo-controlled study also double blind?

3) How many milligrams of sage oil did each member of the experimental group receive?

4) Would the desired effects last over a period of several months, or do the benefits wane with use of the supplement?

Also worth noting is the article’s statement that “… the clinical trials conducted so far have used sage oil extracted from a species different from the common garden sage.”