Current Research Priorities
Making an early diagnosis and finding a treatment with robust effects are among the current research priorities in this field. If you already suffer from mild memory loss that continues to worsen even after you adopt the memory-enhancing strategies described in this book, I recommend physician consultation to make sure that you are not suffering from early dementia, whether it be Alzheimer’s or a less common type.
CHAPTER 14
Medications: Regulated and Unregulated
Guilty until Proven Innocent
In a court of law, you are innocent until proven guilty. In science, you are guilty until proven innocent. The FDA assumes that medications don’t work (“guilty”) and that it’s up to the pharmaceutical company, or whoever else is bringing the claim, to prove that the medication is more
effective than placebo in a minimum of two separate double-blind (neither the patient nor doctor knows if active medication or placebo is given) clinical studies involving hundreds to even thousands of patients.
A Small Catch: The Practice Effect
As discussed in the Preface, in evaluating treatments for memory loss, a unique factor absolutely mandates a placebo-controlled trial. This is called the practice effect.
When you first try to complete neuropsychological tests, which include the tests of memory described in chapter 1, some parts seem difficult. The next time you do the same tests, you are likely to perform better, even on those tests that seemed hard to do the first time. This is the practice effect, which means that repeated testing results in superior performance because the brain automatically (even without conscious learning) begins to figure out how best to do the test. In people with little to no memory loss, the practice effect can last for many months after only a single testing session. Therefore, if neuropsychological test performance is compared before and after medication (or other) treatment for memory loss, there will often be some improvement due to the practice effect. If, however, active medication is compared to placebo, subtracting the change on placebo from the change on active medication gives us the real medication effect, thus accounting for the practice effect, which is assumed to be equal in people on active medication and people on placebo.
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
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