WASHINGTON, DC .-- A pill that increases the power of memory may not be as far-fetched as it sounds . Ampakines, a class of compounds that make nerve cells more sensitive to glutamate, an amino acid, can improve certain types of short-term memory, the researchers reported at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting here yesterday.
In a pilot study in Berlin, Gary Lynch of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues from Cortex Pharmaceuticals in Irvine were about two dozen subjects listen to a sequence of 10 nonsense syllables, then try to remember the syllables 5 minutes later. 25 healthy 20 to recall about half syllables, while from 65 to 73 years normal usually remembered one. But ampakines provided a real boost: When the elderly have received ampakines before the test, they remembered an average of three syllables. A second study suggests that compounds can improve the memories of younger people.
Ampakines seem to bend their powers that improve memory by increasing the absorption of the brain cells of glutamate, a neurotransmitter. Glutamate receptor proteins triggers to open an ion channel in the membrane of a neuron, which allows positively charged ions to flow into the cell. Ampakines influence some type of glutamate receptor, called the AMPA receptor ion channel to keep open a little longer than normal. This becomes substantially more for its money -. More excitement of nerve cells from glutamate each molecule
The researchers suggest carefully and in human trials using low doses of medication, because animal experiments have shown that overactivation excitatory glutamate receptors with ampakines can lead to seizures. But no seizures were observed in human subjects to date and Lynch and his colleagues are planning a small American trial in patients with Alzheimer's disease. There is no reason to believe that ampakines slow the nerve cell death in Alzheimer's disease, said Dennis Selkoe, an expert on the disease at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Instead, Selkoe said, ampakines may one day become part of "a range of therapeutics" in which these compounds are most neurons that remain.
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