Parkinson ’s Drug Helps Seniors in Their Seventies With Decision-Making

Alzheimer's, Dementia & Mental Health

Parkinsons Drug Helps Seniors in Their Seventies With Decision-Making

Discover brain activity of senior citizens is different than in young adults who are better at making decisions

March 25, 2013 - New research finds changes in the patterns of brain activity of senior citizens in their seventies offers new insight into why the elderly are worse at decision-making than young people and they also discover a Parkinsons Disease drug can help reverse age-related impairments in decision-making in older people.

The study from researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London, England, is published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Poorer decision-making is a natural part of the aging process that stems from a decline in our brains' ability to learn from our experiences. Part of the decision-making process involves learning to predict the likelihood of getting a reward from the choices that we make.

An area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens is responsible for interpreting the difference between the reward that we're expecting to get from a decision and the reward that is actually received.

These so called 'prediction errors', reported by a brain chemical called dopamine, help us to learn from our actions and modify our behavior to make better choices the next time.

Dr. Rumana Chowdhury, who led the study at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, said: "We know that dopamine decline is part of the normal aging process so we wanted to see whether it had any effect on reward-based decision making.

We found that when we treated older people who were particularly bad at making decisions with a drug that increases dopamine in the brain, their ability to learn from rewards improved to a level comparable to somebody in their twenties and enabled them to make better decisions."

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Parkinson ’s Drug Helps Seniors in Their Seventies With Decision-Making