Ask your doctor and stroke hospital to followup and see how close to regular use this is. Survivors should be able to benefit.
One Day There May Be a Drug to Turbocharge the Brain. Who Should Get It?
By Carl Zimmer
In
2011, Dr. Dena Dubal was hired by the University of California, San
Francisco, as an assistant professor of neurology. She set up a new lab
with one chief goal: to understand a mysterious hormone called Klotho.
Dr.
Dubal wondered if it might be the key to finding effective treatments
for dementia and other disorders of the aging brain. At the time,
scientists only knew enough about Klotho to be fascinated by it.
Mice
bred to make extra Klotho lived 30 percent longer, for instance. But
scientists also had found Klotho in the brain, and so Dr. Dubal launched
experiments to see whether it had any effect on how mice learn and
remember.
The results were startling. In one study, she and her colleagues found that extra Klotho protects mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease from cognitive decline. “Their thinking, in every way that we could measure them, was preserved,” said Dr. Dubal.
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She
and her colleagues also bred healthy mice to make extra Klotho. They
did better than their fellow rodents on learning mazes and other
cognitive tests.
Klotho didn’t just protect their brains, the researchers concluded — it enhanced them. Experiments on more mice turned up similar results.
“I
just couldn’t believe it — was it true, or was it just a false
positive?” Dr. Dubal recalled. “But here it is. It enhances of cognition
even in a young mouse. It makes them smarter.”
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Five
years have passed since Dr. Dubal and her colleagues began publishing
these extraordinary results. Other researchers have discovered
tantalizing findings of their own, suggesting that Klotho may protect
against other neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis and
Parkinson’s disease.
Now Dr. Dubal
and other researchers are trying to build treatments based on these
results. Either by injecting Klotho into the body or by stimulating the
brain to make more of the hormone, they hope to treat diseases like
Alzheimer’s.
The
researchers developing these treatments readily acknowledge that they
may fail. And other Klotho experts think there’s a huge amount of work
left to do first to figure out how Klotho affects the brain.
“You’ve
got all of this amazing stuff showing a really major impact, but we
can’t really explain why,” said Gwendalyn D. King, a neuroscientist at
the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “That’s where we’re stuck.”
But what happens if scientists get unstuck? What if a drug that enhances cognition really were possible?
Eric
Juengst, the director of the University of North Carolina Center for
Bioethics, has been thinking about these questions for two decades —
back when such drugs were little more than thought experiments.
We
tend to think of drugs that enhance performance — say, sports doping —
as bad. Drugs that cure or prevent diseases are good. “The scientific
community and the public all draw that line,” said Dr. Juengst.
When
it comes to Klotho, there may be no such line. In theory, such a drug
might offer both a way to prevent diseases of the brain and to enhance
it.
Recent research is giving these questions a sudden urgency, according to Dr. Juengst.
“It’s
exciting for someone who’s been doing armchair work on this for a long
time to see it happening in the real world,” he said. “But it also makes
it all the more pressing that this conversation get started in
earnest.”
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