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Antidepressants may counter effects of brain ageing: study
Why is it in news?
- A commonly used antidepressant medication Prozac can counter some of the effects of brain ageing, such as sensory and cognitive decline, an MIT study suggests.
More in news
- Fresh evidence that the decline in the capacity of brain cells to change — called ‘plasticity’ — rather than a decline in total cell number, may underlie some of the sensory and cognitive declines associated with normal brain ageing.
- Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that they could restore a significant degree of lost plasticity to the cells by treating mice with the commonly used antidepressant medication fluoxetine, also known as Prozac.
- Despite common belief, loss of neurons due to cell death is quite limited during normal ageing and unlikely to account for age-related functional impairments.
- Structural alterations in neuronal morphology and synaptic connections are features most consistently correlated with brain age, and may be considered as the potential physical basis for the age-related decline.
- Researchers focused on the ageing of inhibitory interneurons which is less well-understood than that of excitatory neurons, but potentially more crucial to plasticity.
- Plasticity, in turn, is key to enabling learning and memory and in maintaining sensory acuity.
- In the study, while they focused on the visual cortex, the plasticity they measured is believed to be important elsewhere in the brain as well.
Source
The Hindu