Roflumilast is a drug already used to slow the progression of obstructive pulmonary disease severe chronic disease, in addition to helping in the treatment of inflammatory conditions of the lung, being synthesized in 1993. However, scientists may have discovered a new function for the drug, according to an article published in the journal Current Biology.
For this, the researchers used some rats in a cage with different objects, changing the position of some things after a few days. It was demonstrated that the rats could not identify the change, unless some neurons of the hippocampus (part responsible for storing space information and forming memories) were activated.
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However, if the neurons of the mentioned hippocampus responsible for memories received some impulse, the rats could remember the information. Thus, it was possible to perceive that the information had been stored in the brain of the rodents, but they simply did not have the capacity to retrieve such information.
Although the study has only been carried out with rodents so far, it is possible that the studies in the area continue advancing until they can state whether the same would be possible to be done with the humans.
When asked why roflumilast was able to provide this recovery of memoirs, since it is a very specific medicine, which acts in the lung region, the scientists answered that: “When we gave roflumilast to mice that were trained during sleep deprivation just before the second test, they remembered exactly as it happened with direct stimulation of neurons.”
This is because, in addition to all the effects of the drug, it provides an increase in the amount of a molecule specific cell signaling, which ends up decreasing when memory suffers from loss of sleep.
Thus, the objective for the future of these researches is to better analyze how the human brain receives, stores and remembers the information, only then is it possible to seek some solution so that we can recover memories forgotten.
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