Sunday, November 12, 2006

New Therapy Improves Memory and Learning Under Stress


Here is an interesting News Report from Stanford University about a new therapy that could offer hope to patients who suffer from the severe neurological side effects of steroids. Neuroscientists have designed a gene that enhances memory and learning ability in animals under stress. Here is an excerpt from the story.

The goal of the study was to see if rats treated with gene therapy would perform differently than normal rats during the water maze tests following exposure to stress. To administer gene therapy, the researchers anesthetized the rodent, inserted a syringe into its hippocampus and injected a genetically engineered virus with DNA containing the chimeric gene. Once injected, individual copies of the virus penetrate the hippocampal neurons, thereby delivering the chimeric gene and activating it in the rat's brain. The new gene then transforms harmful corticoids into helpful estrogens—a process that should hypothetically block the animal's negative behavioral response to stress.

....Stress tests were conducted before the animal received training, immediately after training and 24 hours later. "This taps into three different domains and three different timings—the effects of stress on learning, on storing learned information as memory and on retrieving that memory," Sapolsky explained.

The results were clear: When stress was applied 24 hours after training, the rats infected with the chimeric gene swam to the area of the missing platform faster, and spent significantly more time looking for it, than the normal rats did.

"These results are pretty fantastic," Nicholas said. "They suggest that this gene therapy not only blocks the deleterious effects of glucocorticoids but actually enhances spatial memory and learning through estrogen-controlled events, even in the presence of stress. Seeing this enhancement effect was pretty exciting. It's the best we could have hoped for."

The Stanford story also has a link to an interesting video (under Related Info). And the study was published in the Nov. 8th issue of Journal of Neuroscience. Here is the abstract of that article:

"Enhancing Cognition after Stress with Gene Therapy"
Andrea Nicholas, Carolina D. Munhoz,Deveroux Ferguson, Laura Campbell,1\ and Robert Sapolsky

Hippocampal function is essential for the acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval of spatial memory. High circulating levels of glucocorticoids (GCs), the adrenal steroid hormones secreted during stress, have been shown to impair both acquisition and retrieval and can either impair or enhance consolidation, depending on experimental conditions. In contrast, estrogen can enhance spatial memory performance and can block the deleterious effects of GCs on such performance. We therefore constructed a chimeric gene ("ER/GR") containing the hormone-binding domain of the GC receptor and the DNA binding domain of the estrogen receptor; as a result, ER/GR transduces deleterious GC signals into beneficial estrogenic ones. We show here that acute immobilization stress, before acquisition and retrieval phases, increases latencies for male rats in a hidden platform version of the Morris water maze. This impairment is blocked by hippocampal expression of the ER/GR transgene. ER/GR expression also blocks decreases in platform crossings caused by acute stress, either after acquisition or before retrieval. Three days of stress before acquisition produces an estrogen-like enhancement of performance in ER/GR-treated rats. Moreover, ER/GR blocks the suppressive effects of GCs on expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a growth factor central to hippocampal-dependent cognition and plasticity, instead producing an estrogenic increase in BDNF expression. Thus, ER/GR expression enhances spatial memory performance and blocks the impairing effects of GCs on such performance.

Cheers,
Colin