Two parts of the brain are known to send electrical currents and remember information, which promotes immediate recall of words in people over the age of 65, according to one study. The study by a team from Boston University published Monday in Nature Neuroscience.
“Whether these improvements will hold for everyday memories, and not just lists of words, remains to be tested,” Masood Hussain, professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. He was not involved in the study.
Still, the study “provides significant evidence that stimulating the brain with a small amount of electric current is safe and may even improve memory,” says director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at the Center for Brain Health in Schmidt, Florida Atlantic University. Dr Richard Isaacson said. College of Medicine, which was not involved in the research.
“The improvements were most pronounced in people in the study with the poorest memories, who would be “considered to have mild cognitive impairment,” said neuroscientist Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study.
“There was a clearly beneficial effect on immediate word recall in people with mild cognitive impairment,” said Tanzi, MD, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
“This preliminary but promising finding warrants further exploration of the use of bioelectronic approaches for disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.
promote brain transformation
Scientists used to think that by a certain point in early adulthood the brain had become immobile, unable to grow or change. Today, it is widely understood that the brain is capable of plasticity – the ability to reorganize its structure, functions or connections – throughout life.
Transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS, attempts to increase brain function with a device that applies wavelike Electrical currents pass through electrodes on the scalp to specific areas of the brain. Electrical waves can mimic or alter brainwave activity to stimulate growth and, hopefully, alter the neural networking of the brain.
Dr. Gayatri Devi, clinical professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell University in New York, said, “I believe this is the future of neurologic interventions to help strengthen the networks in our brains. ” York. she was not involved in the new study.
“Furthermore, treatment may be tailored to each individual, depending on that individual’s strengths and weaknesses, something pharmacotherapy is not able to do,” Devi said.
In the new findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, brain cells are “activated at specific time points, and this is defined by the frequency of the (electrical) stimulus,” said study co-author Shrey Grover, a postdoctoral student in Brain, Behavior and Cognition. he said. program at Boston University.
He said, “The consequence of changing the time brain cells are activated is that it induces this process of plasticity. Plasticity is what allows the effects to be carried forward in time even when the stimulus is over, ” They said.
memories fade
As the brain ages, it is common for some to lose the ability to remember. For some it may be the short-term memory that suffers the most: Where did I park my car at the mall on this shopping trip? Others may have trouble remembering things for a long time: Where did I park my car two weeks ago before boarding the plane for vacation? And some struggle with both types of memory.
Researchers at Boston University analyzed both long-term memory and short-term or working memory separately in two experiments, each in a random group of 20 people aged 65 to 88. The experiments alternated between applying gamma waves at 60 Hz and theta waves at 4 Hz. To the two brain centers that play an important role in memory.
A brain is intensely and completely engaged on gamma waves. People under stress that need to be laser-focused – such as when they are taking an exam, solving a complex problem or fixing a difficult mechanical problem – can generate gamma waves. .
targeting memory regions of the brain
In the first experiment, one group received high-frequency (60 Hz) gamma waves in their prefrontal cortex, which sits directly behind the eyes and forehead. As a center of learning and cognition, the prefrontal lobe helps store long-term memories.
A separate group of 20 people received low-frequency (4 Hz) theta stimulation in the parietal cortex, an area of the brain located below where a cheese would sit. The parietal cortex is on top of the hippocampus, another part of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory. People with Alzheimer’s often have a shrunken hippocampus as the organ loses tissue and shrinks.
A third group of 20 people underwent a sham procedure to serve as a control group.
The session took place over four consecutive days. Each person took five 20-word recall tests during a daily 20-min stimulus. They were asked to quickly recall as many words as they could at the end of each of the five trials.
The research team rated the performance in two ways: How well did the participants remember the words from the end of the list that they would have just heard? This will be a measure of short-term or working memory. How many words could they remember from the beginning of each list, which would have been minutes earlier? he will assess the outcome Ability to remember for some time.
The results showed that 17 out of 20 people who received high-frequency gamma stimulation improved their ability to remember words from the start of the word test – what the researchers found. This is called long term memory.
Similarly, 18 of the 20 participants who underwent low-frequency theta stimulation improved their short-term working memory, or their ability to remember. Last heard words.
Compared to a group of people who received sham or placebo stimulation, those who received the treatment saw results that “translation for older individuals, on average, remembered four to six more words out of a list of 20 words by the end of 4″. -day intervention,” said study co-author Robert Reinhart, director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory in Boston. university.
“It is important to emphasize that the study showed a modest but significant improvement, primarily in short-term memory, but did not show a clear effect on long-term memory because the test was based on word recall within only a minute or so of learning the words.” ,” said Tanzi.
“Cognitive experts would say that what you remember an hour ago is long-term memory,” Tanzi said. “But with respect to the clinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s and age-related memory loss, we would group this into short-term memory. When we say that Alzheimer’s patients maintain long-term memory, we tend to remember the details of their wedding day. talking about doing it.”
personalized treatment
The study found that in the second experiment, flipping the areas of the brain that received theta and gamma stimulation showed no benefit. A third experiment was conducted with 30 people to verify the previous results.
One month after the intervention, the participants were asked to take another word recall test to see if the memory improved.
Overall, the results showed that low-frequency theta currents improved short-term working memory at one month while high-frequency gamma stimulation did not. The opposite was true for long-term memories – gamma, but not theta, outperformed.
“Depending on the spatial location and frequency of electrical stimulation, we can improve either short-term memory or long-term memory separately,” explained Reinhart, an assistant professor in Boston University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
That means researchers can tailor treatments to an individual’s needs, Reinhart said.
What would that be like? The devices are well tolerated, with no limited side effects.
“For now, these treatments are cumbersome to obtain, as specialized equipment is required. This can be time-intensive and even costly,” Isaacson said. “Still, there are limited treatment options for cognitive aging, which affects millions of people, so this is a hopeful step towards relieving symptoms and improving brain health.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)