'Love Hormone' Oxytocin Could be Used to Treat Cognitive Disorders Like Alzheimer's
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:
'Love hormone' oxytocin could be used to treat cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's:
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive disorder in which the nerve cells (neurons) in a person's brain and the connections among them degenerate slowly, causing severe memory loss, intellectual deficiencies, and deterioration in motor skills and communication. One of the main causes of Alzheimer's is the accumulation of a protein called amyloid (A) in clusters around neurons in the brain, which hampers their activity and triggers their degeneration.
[...] a team of scientists from Japan, led by Professor Akiyoshi Saitoh from the Tokyo University of Science, has looked at oxytocin, a hormone conventionally known for its role in the female reproductive system and in inducing the feelings of love and well-being. "Oxytocin was recently found to be involved in regulating learning and memory performance, but so far, no previous study deals with the effect of oxytocin on A-induced cognitive impairment," Prof Saitoh says.
[...] Prof Saitoh and team first perfused slices of the mouse hippocampus with A to confirm that A causes the signaling abilities of neurons in the slices to decline or-in other words-impairs their synaptic plasticity. Upon additional perfusion with oxytocin, however, the signaling abilities increased, suggesting that oxytocin can reverse the impairment of synaptic plasticity that A causes.
To find out how oxytocin achieves this, they conducted a further series of experiments. In a normal brain, oxytocin acts by binding with special structures in the membranes of brain cells, called oxytocin receptors. The scientists artificially 'blocked' these receptors in the mouse hippocampus slices to see if oxytocin could reverse A-induced impairment of synaptic plasticity without binding to these receptors. Expectedly, when the receptors were blocked, oxytocin could not reverse the effect of A, which shows that these receptors are essential for oxytocin to act.
Journal Reference:
Junpei Takahashi, et al.Oxytocin reverses A-induced impairment of hippocampal synaptic plasticity in mice, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2020.04.046
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