Parkinson’s Drug Could Aid Mental Health Decline

The popular medication for those diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease could help age-related mental declines in older patients, according to a new discovery, which could help improve their ability to make decisions. A study carried out by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging helped researchers realised that the drug increases the levels of dopamine in the brains of Parkinson’s patients, which helped them to make better decisions through improving the area of the brain which is responsible for judgement and learning. This could provide a better insight into age-related health concerns to help treatment.

Researchers also noted that there are changes which occur in the patterns of brain activity in people over the age of seventy, which explains why older people often have a more difficult time making decisions than younger generations. Dopamine is important for this, so it stands to reason that decreasing levels which are natural during the ageing process will affect the decision-making process. The study noted that a lowered ability to make decisions stems from the brain’s ability to learn from experiences, which decreases with age. Previous studies have shown that the nucleus accumbens, the part of the brain which deals with this, is affected by dopamine levels.
The study involved 32 healthy seniors who were compared with 22 people in their twenties. The older participants were given a task which mirrored the kind of decisions gamblers make when using slot machines, so that researchers could track the activity in the brain to assess their performance before and after taking the drug. The study showed that those who had taken the drug had a better ‘integrity’ when the dopamine pathways were analysed. Researchers noted that this study offers a great deal of information into the functions of the brain in older people, which could help treatments for age-related illnesses.

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