A new study has been released that gives some hope that memories lost to Alzheimer’s Disease can be retrieved. In the experiment, mice were deliberately bred so that they would develop plaque in their brain that causes the disease. The researchers then exposed the altered mice, along with normal ones, to a box that had an electric charge. The normal mice quickly remembered the box and would avoid it but those mice with the disease never developed a fear response which indicated they did not remember what happened before. However, the mice with the memory loss were also bred with a protein in the area of their brain that controls short term memory. When the proteins were triggered, the mice then showed a response the electrically charged box based on their memory alone which indicated that the original exposure was remembered all along but something prevented a retrieval of the memory. While any application for humans is still far off, the study raises hopes that memories seemingly lost to Alzheimer’s may one day be retrievable.
See Sara Reardon, Memories retrieved in mutant ‘Alzheimer’s’ mice, Nature, March 16, 2016.
