Health Insider Update

In a surprising finding, a new class of cancer drug has been found to be able to sharpen information in the brain and enhance long-term memory. Researchers are calling this a “critical finding” for Alzheimer’s research.

“The reason it is used in cancer is because often one of the things the cell has to do in order to become cancerous is change how it (works),” she said. “If we can kind of change what a cancer cell is doing, then maybe we can stop it from actually activating genes that make it cancerous and make it back into a normal cell,” said psychologist Kasia Bieszczad. Like a potentially cancerous cell, neurons appear to be alterable as well.

When these drugs were used in animal trials, researchers sought to determine whether the dosed animals were better able to learn tasks.
The results confirmed the effectiveness of this drug.

“What was interesting is the animals that were given the drug told us that they remembered a lot more about the sounds — exactly which frequencies they were, how loud they were, the fact that there were multiple sounds, that they did not just have to remember one,” Bieszczad said. “So they remembered more, and in more detail, about the training stimulus.”

The research team interpreted the findings to mean  this drug enhances and sharpens information, which can be put into long-term memory.

Anything that helps toward preventing Alzheimer’s is very important, especially given the rise in neurological conditions in America. As humans live longer, the risk of Alzheimer’s grows each year. Longer lives mean increased chance of brain disease.

Such a finding offers hope for the millions of affected patents and their families. Increased long-term memory would drastically mitigate the impact of Alzheimer’s, and such a line of research could potentially lead to ever further treatments. This is an exciting time for neurological research.