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lou_lou · 02-05-2008, 08:00 PM

Go to Google NewsFluke discovery suggests deep brain stimulation may help mitigate memory loss
6 days ago

TORONTO - Canadian scientists studying whether electrodes implanted in the brain could help suppress appetite have instead stumbled across a potential treatment for people in the early stages of memory loss.

In what the lead scientist himself describes as a "Eureka moment," researchers at Toronto Western Hospital reported Wednesday that an attempt to use deep brain stimulation as an experimental obesity therapy triggered vivid autobiographical memories in the 50-year-old man being treated.

Further, when the electrodes were left on for a period of months, testing showed that the man had a "substantial" gain in a specific type of memory function, the part used to draw associations between items or places.

The very preliminary findings - published Wednesday in the Annals of Neurology - have led the team to launch a pilot project to see if deep brain stimulation could help enhance the memory of people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

The senior scientist, Dr. Andreas Lozano, said the team was instantly excited when the man - who was awake as the electrodes were being placed and tested - began to describe in sharp detail events of a day roughly 30 years earlier, when he was in a park with friends.

"Well, it was a Eureka moment, because we were looking for an effect on appetite," said Lozano, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Toronto and Toronto Western Hospital.

"We knew it was very significant immediately. Because whenever you find something unexpected, you're not biased. And so it tells you that you're onto something that's probably quite real, and quite significant."

"I think that in scientific discoveries these are the best ones. The ones you're not expecting."

The man, who does not wish to be identified, had struggled with life-long obesity and weighed over 400 pounds at the time the electrodes were implanted. Diets, medicine, group therapy, psychological interventions - nothing had worked to curb his eating.

He was unwilling to undergo gastric bypass surgery, convinced he would keep on eating excessively despite the intervention. So the team at Toronto Western tried another tack.

Deep brain stimulation is used for a number of conditions and is being investigated for more. It involves boring holes through the skull to plant electrodes - spaghetti-thin wires - that touch particular parts of the brain and then thread down to a pacemaker-like device implanted on the chest. The device feeds an electrical current into the brain.

Approximately 30,000 Parkinson's sufferers are using deep brain stimulation to mitigate their symptoms. And the treatment is also being used on people suffering from profound and persistent depression - work Lozano has been part of.

So his team decided to try using electrodes on the hippocampus, a part of the brain known to be important for long term memory storage, in the belief stimulation of this part of the brain would curb the man's appetite.

In fact, while it did depress the man's appetite it did not trigger weight loss. Lozano said in this case the man "over rode" or ignored the loss of hunger and continued to eat.

But the early evidence of spontaneous memory retrieval led the team to test him to see if use of the device would enhance memory.

Mary Pat McAndrews, a neuropsychologist on the team who conducted the testing, said she was initially hesitant to believe the stimulation was having the reported effect.

"When you have a single person to work with, then you have to be very alert to the fact there can be a lot of other factors responsible," she said.

But when the same results were shown in repeated testing spaced over several months "I felt pretty confident that it was the real goods."

Dr. John Hart, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Neurology and medical scientific director of the Centre for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas, called the work intriguing. But he said he'd want to see more evidence that stimulating this part of the brain is activating the pathways the researchers believe they are activating.

"I love and am always looking for better ways to improve memory," said Hart.

"So I'm not at all negative to these kinds of findings. I just want there to be a little more study."

The man's memory gain was selective, dealing only with associations. He scored higher on tests involving identifying pairs of words previously seen when the electrodes were turned on. But he was no better at other memory tasks.

"So it wasn't that he just became more attentive or aware or had better general processing. It really had to do with this very specific aspect of memory," McAndrews said.

The team has launched a pilot study to see if the treatment would work to shore up the memory capacities of people in the early stages of Alzheimer's.

Three of six patients have had the electrodes implanted so far. McAndrews said the plan is to study these people over the course of a year to see if memory is improved and if the improvement lasts. There would be little point in using such an invasive and expensive therapy if an effect is transient, she said.

"What we would be then hopeful for - and we're in very early stages so it's just a hope at this point - is that we may be able to enhance that circuitry in a system where it's already damaged . . . and that that would then translate into better functioning in daily life," McAndrews said.
for the rest of article ~~.
http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...ro2_WSEqswqA1A