NewScientist (31 October 2015, paywall) reports exciting news, if you’re a rat:
A drug called montelukast (Singulair), regularly prescribed for asthma and allergic rhinitis, blocks these receptors, so Aigner and his colleagues tested it on young and old rats. The team used oral doses equivalent to those taken by people with asthma. The older animals were 20 months old – perhaps between 65 and 75 in human years. The younger rats were 4 months old – roughly the equivalent of 17 human years. The animals were fed the drug daily for six weeks, while another set of young and old rats were left untreated. There were 20 young and 14 old rats in total.
The rats took part in a range of learning and memory tests. One of these involved the rats being placed in a pool of water with a hidden escape platform. At the start of the study, untreated young rats learned to recognise landmarks and quickly find their way to the platform, while the untreated older animals struggled at the task.
By the end of their six-week drug regime, though, old animals performed as well as their younger companions. “We restored learning and memory 100 per cent, to a level comparable with youth,” says [Ludwig] Aigner [at Paracelsus Medical University Salzburg in Austria]. He presented his findings earlier this month at the Neuroscience 2015 meeting in Chicago.
You’d think an affect on humans would have been reported, though.
