— Toward the Development of New Dopamine-Based Therapies —
In the US, the increasing number of patients with Alzheimer’s disease has become a major social issue. Development of effective treatments is an urgent priority. One key to treatment development could be to identify specific neurons responsible for memory impairment.
At UCI MIND, Kei Igarashi and his lab members previously discovered in 2021 that dopamine in a brain region called the entorhinal cortex plays a key role in memory formation. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, the team found that memory impairment in Alzheimer’s disease is caused by dysfunction of dopamine neurons located in the entorhinal cortex. Furthermore, when they conducted treatment experiments to increase dopamine levels in the entorhinal cortex of Alzheimer’s model mice using existing dopamine-related drugs such as LEVODOPA, they observed an improvement in memory performance in the mice.
LEVODOPA is an approved drug for Parkinson’s disease but not currently approved for Alzheimer’s disease. These findings are expected to contribute to the development of new dopamine-based therapeutic approaches for Alzheimer’s disease.
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