Oxytocin, the “love hormone”, can be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease-sex and relationship

In a recent study, scientists looked at oxytocin. Oxytocin affects the female reproductive system and Induce love and happiness-As a possible element for treating cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive disorder in which the nerve cells (neurons) in the human brain and the connections between them are slowly degenerated, causing severe memory loss, intellectual disability, and deterioration of motor ability and communication.

One of the leading causes of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of a protein called amyloid b (Ab) in clusters around neurons in the brain. This blocks neuronal activity and causes degeneration.

Studies in animal models have shown that increased Ab aggregation in the hippocampus, the main learning and memory center of the brain, reduces the signaling potential of neurons within it.

This degeneration affects a specific property of neurons called “synaptic plasticity.” This is the ability of the synapse, the place of signal exchange between neurons, to adapt to increasing or decreasing signaling activity over time.

Synaptic plasticity is important for hippocampal learning and cognitive development. Therefore, Ab and its role in the development of cognitive memory and disorders have been the focus of most research aimed at finding treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

To promote this research, a team of Japanese scientists led by Professor Akiyoshi Saito of Tokyo University of Science examined oxytocin.

“Oxytocin was recently found to be involved in the regulation of learning and memory abilities, but so far no previous studies have addressed the effects of oxytocin on Ab-induced cognitive impairment,” Saito. The professor says.

To achieve this, Professor Saito’s group set out to connect the dots. Their findings are published in the Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communication.

Prof. Saito and team-first perfuse mouse hippocampal slices with Ab and confirm that Ab impairs the signaling capacity of neurons in the slice, that is, impairs synaptic plasticity. However, further perfusion with oxytocin increases signaling capacity, suggesting that oxytocin can reverse the Ab-induced impairment of synaptic plasticity.

To find out how oxytocin accomplishes this, they conducted a further series of experiments. In the normal brain, oxytocin acts by binding to a special structure of the brain cell membrane called the oxytocin receptor.

Scientists look to artificially “block” these receptors in mouse hippocampal slices to reverse Ab-induced impaired synaptic plasticity without oxytocin binding to these receptors. It was.

As expected, oxytocin failed to reverse the effects of Ab when the receptor was blocked. This indicates that these receptors are essential for the action of oxytocin.

Oxytocin is known to enhance the signal transduction ability of neurons and promote chemical activities of specific cells important for memory formation such as influx of calcium ions. Previous studies suspected that Ab suppressed some of these chemical activities.

When scientists artificially blocked these chemical activities, they found that the addition of oxytocin supplementation to hippocampal slices did not reverse the damage to synaptic plasticity caused by Abs.

In addition, they found that oxytocin itself does not affect hippocampal synaptic plasticity, but it can somehow reverse the adverse effects of Abs.

“This is the first study in the world to show that oxytocin can reverse Ab-induced damage in the mouse hippocampus,” Saito said.

This is only the first step, and further studies in vivo in animal models and humans are needed before collecting sufficient knowledge to relocate oxytocin to Alzheimer’s drug. However, Professor Saito still hopes.

“Currently, there are no drugs that are sufficiently satisfactory to treat dementia, and new therapies with new modes of action are desired. Our study shows that oxytocin is associated with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. It presents an interesting possibility of being a new treatment for the treatment of memory loss.Our findings open up new avenues for the creation of new drugs for the treatment of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s disease. I look forward to it,” he said.

(This article has been published from the telegraph agency feed with no changes to the text. Only the headings have changed.)

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