Total recall: Restoring lost memories
March 19, 2016:
The Economist: Missing memories have been restored in mice with Alzheimer’s disease.
SOME mice can easily remember where they hide food, but not those genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Like humans they become forgetful. By the time these mice are seven months old they are unable to remember, for example, which arm of a maze they have explored before. Two months later, their brains are riddled with amyloid beta, the protein “plaques” that also characterise the latter stage of the disease in humans.
Now researchers have managed to restore memories to mice with Alzheimer’s. This helps provide more evidence about how memories are lost during the early stages of the disease and may point to how, some time in the future, those memories might be brought back.
