Phosphatidylserine (PS): What It Actually Does for Your Brain

Sometimes you know something but can't quite retrieve it. Why researchers became so interested in phosphatidylserine.

Each of get dopa’s ingredients has been carefully selected for a specific reason. Phosphatidylserine is such a nightmare to pronounce that we call it PS (it’s FOSS-fa-TIE-dil-SEER-een by the way). It’s an ingredient that does an important job that is easy to undersell with just a line on a package. PS isn’t there to give you a quick lift or a buzz. It’s there to keep our brains’ signals moving efficiently. It’s unglamorous work around maintaining the structure of cells, work that only becomes obvious when it starts to fail. 

PS does not send the messages itself. But it does build and maintain the cell membrane structure that those messages travel through. A sort of architect that helps the right signal to get to the right place, at the right time.

What is Phosphatidylserine, what does it do?

PS is a phospholipid, an essential type of fat that forms the core structural component of every cell membrane in our bodies. The brain is unusually rich in it, because brain cells rely so heavily on membranes that can stay flexible and fluid. Every time one neuron fires a signal to another, that signal has to pass through a membrane that is built largely from phospholipids like PS. PS contributes to the structure and properties of neuronal cell membranes, which provide the physical environment in which receptors, proteins and other components involved in signalling operate enabling signals to pass cleanly and quickly.

As we age, people often experience increased difficulty in finding the right word, the right name, or a key fact they know they know! 

A 2010 Japanese randomised controlled trial (1) looked at soy-based PS in older adults with memory and recall challenges. The most interesting results appeared among participants who started with relatively poorer memory scores. In this group, PS was associated with real improvements, particularly in delayed verbal recall, the ability to retrieve information after a period of time. It's one of the clearer findings in the research that PS's role at the membrane level has a measurable relationship with how well we recall what we already know. 

PS is not about creating a new ability. It is all about maintaining the physical infrastructure that our existing abilities depend on.
 

How Brain Membranes Change With Age

The lipid composition of our brain cell membranes is not fixed, instead it changes across adult life.(2) This is part of the wider, gradual changes in membrane composition documented in human brain tissue studies that happen naturally to everyone over time. This is not about something going wrong. It is a natural change, which can accumulate effects. 

These changes matter because the structure and composition of neuronal membranes influence how brain cells communicate. That is one reason why researchers have become interested in whether supplying PS through diet might help support cognitive function as we get older. This manifests as something many of us recognise as we age: needing a moment or two longer to retrieve a particular word, name or fact, or finding that sustained concentration takes a little more conscious effort than it once did. 

PS is one of four ingredients we look at in detail in What the Research Shows About the Brain After 40, alongside Ginkgo Biloba, Bacopa Monnieri, and vitamin B12.
 

PS and Cortisol: Why It Matters Under Pressure

Cortisol is our main stress hormone. It’s released into the bloodstream via a system called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HPA axis for short. In short bursts, cortisol can be very useful in sharpening focus and mobilising energy. But—there is an big but. When the HPA axis is triggered too often or too intensely, sustained high cortisol is associated with the kind of foggy, depleted feeling that can make it harder to concentrate and harder to follow through. 

PS sits right at the membrane level within the HPA system that runs this response, and it is one of the more established nutrients studied in 2014 in controlled research (3) on the HPA axis where high doses of PS and phosphatidic acid positively helped with individuals’ reaction to an acute laboratory stress test in participants who had reported high levels of chronic stress. The high dose used in this study is bigger than we’ve chosen to use, and although it’s an intriguing area of research, the doses and combination used mean the results shouldn’t be directly extrapolated to the lower dose we’ve used within get dopa. 

The relationship between PS and cortisol has been studied for decades, largely because PS has a key role in maintaining membrane structure, not just in the neurons that are involved in memory, but also in the very glands and receptors that regulate cortisol output. This is one of the reasons that PS earns a place in get dopa, alongside magnesium and B6, two nutrients with their own role in normal psychological function. 
 

Why We Chose Sunflower Phosphatidylserine

Not all PS on the market is the same, and where it comes from matters. 

The earliest PS came from bovine brain cortex, in other words, from cows. Bovine-sourced PS had been heavily researched, but in the 1990s there was national and international concern over the safety of the source due to a disease called BSE and the recognition of prions as a potential health problem. As a result, that source was discontinued completely in the 1990s and soy became the standard plant-based replacement. 

Soy-derived PS and its benefits are now well studied, but there are two practical downsides. First, soy is a common food allergen, and secondly much of the world's soy crop is genetically modified. get dopa has chosen sunflower-derived PS as an expensive, but high-purity alternative to soy. It therefore carries no soy allergen risk and allows us to avoid the GMO sourcing concerns associated with much of the global soy crop. The evidence base specifically on sunflower-sourced PS is younger than the soy-sourced literature, and we think it is important to say that plainly rather than minimise it. But it supplies the same phospholipid class — phosphatidylserine — that the much larger soy-derived PS research base has investigated.

get dopa contains 100g of the sunflower form which carries no allergen risk and doesn't have the sourcing trade-offs that soy carries. 

Why PS Is Expensive, and Why It Earns Its Place Anyway

PS is the most expensive ingredient, gram for gram, in the get dopa formula. That could be why some supplements leave it out, or include it in nominal amounts. 

The cost starts with the raw material itself. We source sunflower lecithin that is pure enough and clean enough to yield high-quality phosphatidylserine. That quality needs to be verified at every stage, from the source seed to the finished capsule. That means an inevitable cost that get dopa believe is worth the pay-off. 

It would be cheaper to leave PS out of the get dopa formula entirely, or add a token amount just so it can be added to the packaging label. That’s the kind of decision that gets made when a formula is designed to keep investors happy rather than the people it’s designed for — a line item gets trimmed here, or quietly swapped for a cheaper form there, and everybody hopes that no one outside the boardroom notices. get dopa is still an independent business, and we'd rather answer to the people taking it. We chose to include PS at a meaningful dosage because that’s the right thing to do.

The Architect, Doing Its Job Quietly

None of what PS does is loud. It does not create a buzz, and you will not feel it working the way you might feel a double espresso. What it does is maintain the physical structure your brain's signals rely on, every day, so the rest of the formula — and the rest of you — has something well-built to work with. 

Your brain isn't your liability. It's your advantage. Ingredients like PS are part of how we help you keep it that way.