A drug used for stroke patients may help sharpen middle-aged brains, researchers are reporting.
If proven in humans, the drug may one day help blunt the impact of normal aging “or even enhance learning and memory throughout the life span,” the American Psychological Association said in an announcing the findings, published in the February issue of the journal, Behavioral Neuroscience.
“I do think that we are going to move into that area,” says lead author Matthew Huentelman, an investigator at the non-profit Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.
“Really, we stumbled on this drug, and what do we do with it? Our drug is only supposed to be used for sick people. Can it be used for healthy individuals as well? It’s a tough question.”
University students are already using Ritalin and other prescription amphetamines to boost their grades. A survey by Nature, a top science magazine, last year revealed one-fifth of its global readership admitted to using “cognition-enhancing” drugs to help them concentrate. And seven prominent neuroscientists and ethicists recently argued in the same journal that not only is the trend likely to grow, but that “mentally competent adults” should be free to use safe cognitive enhancements without being made out to be felons.
But is using brain enhancers to boost productivity and give people a competitive edge cheating, like doping in sports? Would workers need protection from pressure from employers to “enhance?”
Several drugs now being tested in humans may help stave off normal, age-related memory decline in healthy people, and many drugs used to treat psychiatric and neurological problems can also increase how quickly and accurately people think.
The Arizona study began several years ago, when researchers identified a gene that plays a role in memory in humans.
Next they looked for drugs that affect the gene’s function. They tested Fasudil, a drug that improves blood flow to the brain, in rats.
They took 18-month old rats – the equivalent of late-middle-aged humans – and gave the rodents daily injections of hydroxyfasudil, the active form of Fasudil. (In rats, it’s easier to give the drug by injection. People take it in pill form.)
The dosed rats performed significantly better on water maze testing learning and memory than rats given a saline solution. The doped rodents performed more like four-month old rats, or the equivalent of a teenager in human years.
“It was a pretty significant improvement in their memory performance,” Huentelman says.
There were no side effects, and the drug has been shown to be safe and well tolerated when used in humans. The findings, and the relative safety of the drug, support its potential as a “cognitive enhancer in humans,” the researchers report.
Huentelman worries about cognitive-enhancers creeping into high schools and colleges, but if the drugs can push out the onset of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias by even five years, “that’s a massive impact.”
“To me, aging is the worst disease, because it happens to all of us. Improving our ability to age, aging more gracefully as they famously say, is a benefit for all.”
Four of the researchers hold stock in the drug company that owns the rights to develop this drug class as a potential memory enhancer. They said the company was not directly involved in the study and did not fund any part of it.
skirkey@canwest.com