Parkinson ‘s Drug May Help With Decision-Making

A widely used Parkinson's drug may help older people to make up their minds, research suggests.

Poor decision-making is a recognised problem of ageing that stems from an inability to learn from experiences.

Part of the decision-making process involves learning to predict the likelihood of a rewarding outcome.

That in turn implicates dopamine, a brain chemical associated both with reward responses and Parkinson's disease.

Study leader Dr Rumana Chowdhury, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, said: "We know that dopamine decline is part of the normal ageing 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."

The team, who report their findings in the journal Nature Neuroscience, used a combination of behaviour testing and brain imaging to study decision-making in 32 volunteers aged in their seventies.

Their results were compared with those from 22 individuals in their mid-20s.

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Parkinson 's Drug May Help With Decision-Making