One way to improve memory in people with a disorder that can precede Alzheimer's disease is to dampen activity in a part of the brain known as the hippocampus, rather than to boost it as previously thought.
Michela Gallagher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues tested the memory of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment — in which a person's memory is worse than expected for their age — following treatment with a low dose of an anti-seizure drug, levetiracetam, which dampens excess hippocampal activation. Patients given the drug made fewer mistakes on a memory task and showed less hippocampal activity in brain scans than those given a placebo.
Regulating neural activity could control the progression of Alzheimer's disease, the authors suggest.
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Anti-seizure drug boosts memory. Nature 485, 282 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/485282d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/485282d
