Scientists have discovered that the drug roflumilast, used for lung disease, is able to rescue memories that are lost in our mind.
You know when you want to remember a specific word, or someone’s name, and you just can’t?
in an article published in the magazine Current Biologyresearchers found that a drug for lung disease called roflumilast, he can recover “lost” memories. Initially, the tests were carried out with rodents.
The study suggests that forgotten memories can be retrieved days later through activation of certain brain cells. To test this, the scientists placed mice in a cage with several objects and days later they changed the position of some of these objects.
The researchers noted that the rodents were unable to detect the change unless certain neurons in the hippocampus were activated. That is, the animals involved could remember the original location of objects if the hippocampal neurons that encode that information received an impulse.
The study authors’ conclusion is that the information was indeed stored in the brain, but just difficult to retrieve. Therefore, memories considered “lost” can still be recovered artificially.
Of course, for now, this only concerns rodents. It’s still unclear whether the same applies to humans, and there’s still a long way to go before science has an exact answer.
But why, exactly, could a drug as specific as roflumilast trigger this? The researchers explain that, among the various effects of the pharmaceutical product, is the increase in the levels of a cell signaling molecule that decreases when memory is impaired due to sleep loss.
“When we gave roflumilast to rats that were trained during sleep deprivation just before the second test, they rememberedexactly as happened with the direct stimulation of neurons”, say the scientists.
With this, the long-term goal of this type of study is to understand how information is acquired, stored and retrieved in humans, so that a way can be found to help people recover lost memories.
