Discovery of episodic memory
replay in rats could lead to better treatments for Alzheimer's disease
Date: May 10, 2018
Source: Indiana University
Neuroscientists at Indiana
University have reported the first evidence that non-human animals can mentally
replay past events from memory. The discovery could help advance the
development of new drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease.
The study, led by IU professor
Jonathon Crystal, appears today in the journal Current Biology.
"The reason we're interested
in animal memory isn't only to understand animals, but rather to develop new
models of memory that match up with the types of memory impaired in human
diseases such as Alzheimer's disease," said Crystal, a professor in the IU
Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychological and Brain
Sciences and director of the IU Bloomington Program in Neuroscience.
Under the current paradigm,
Crystal said most preclinical studies on potential new Alzheimer's drugs
examine how these compounds affect spatial memory, one of the easiest types of
memory to assess in animals. But spatial memory is not the type of memory whose
loss causes the most debilitating effects of Alzheimer's disease.
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