Drug Could Make Aging Brains More Youthful?

Declining neural activity can be revved up in older brains, monkey study hints.

National Geographic -- "You can't teach an old brain new tricks—but you can restore its ability to remember the old ones, a new study in monkeys suggests.
Chemicals given to rhesus macaques blocked a brain molecule that slows the firing of the brain's nerve cells, or neurons, as we age—prompting those nerve cells to act young again.
"It's our first glimpse of what's going on physiologically that's causing age-related cognitive decline," said study leader Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist at Yale University.
"We all assumed, given there's a lot of architectural changes in aged brains ... that we were stuck with it," Arnsten said.
But with the new results, "the hopeful thing is that the neurochemical environment still makes a big difference, and we might be able to remediate some of these things."

Brain's "Sketch Pad" Declines With Age
As the brain gets older, the prefrontal cortex begins to decline quickly.
This part of the brain is responsible for many high-order functions, including maintaining working memories—the ability to keep things on a "mental sketch pad" in the absence of stimuli from an action-based task.
The researchers had previously found that in young brains, nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex excite each other to keep working memories on the brain's slate.
"Those connections depend on the neurochemical environment, [which] has to be just right, like Goldilocks," she said.
But when people get into their 40s and 50s, that part of the brain begins to accumulate too much of a signaling molecule called cAMP, which can stop the cells from firing as efficiently—leading to forgetfulness and distractedness.
The number of seniors in the United States will likely double by 2050, and many of them will struggle to cope with the frenetic information age, according to the study."
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