The present study evaluated the effects of the two drugs in normal, intact, young adult monkeys to determine whether they check details can result
in cognitive enhancement in a system that is presumably functioning optimally.
Six young pigtail macaques (Macaca nemestrina) were trained on delayed non-matching-to-sample task, a measure of visual recognition memory, up to criterion of 90% correct responses on each of the four delays (10 s, 30s, 60 s, and 90 s). They were then tested on two versions of the task: Task 1 included the four delays intermixed within a session and the monkeys performed it with the accuracy of 90%. Task 2 included, in each of 24 trials, a list of six objects presented in succession. Two objects from the list were then presented for choice paired with novel objects and following two of the four delays intermixed within a session. This task with a higher mnemonic demand yielded
an average performance of 64% correct. Oral administration of huperzine A did not significantly affect the monkeys’ performance on either task. However, a significant negative correlation was found between the baseline performance on each delay and the change in performance under huperzine A, suggesting that under conditions in which the subjects were performing poorly (55-69%), the drug resulted in improved performance, whereas no improvement was obtained when the baseline was close to 90%. Adriamycin In fact, when the subjects were performing very well, huperzine A tended to reduce the performance during accuracy, indicating that in a system that functions optimally, the increased availability of acetylcholine does not improve performance or memory, especially when the animals are close to the maximum performance. In contrast, oral administration of IDRA 21 significantly improved performance on Task 2, especially on the longest delay. This finding supports the potential use of this drug in treatment of cognitive and memory disorders.
This article is part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Trends in Neuropharmacology: In Memory of Erminio Costa’. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Objective: Our objective was
to introduce a new index to evaluate left ventricular aneurysm by quantitative analysis of left ventricular apical geometry.
Methods: A total of 116 selected subjects underwent magnetic resonance imaging, 28 healthy volunteers, 29 patients with dilated cardiomyopathy, and 59 patients with ischemic heart disease (26 with left ventricular aneurysm; 33 with no aneurysm). The apical conicity ratio was calculated as the ratio of left ventricular apical area over apical triangle.
Results: Diastolic apical conicity ratio of patients with left ventricular aneurysm was 1.62 +/- 0.20 and systolic apical conicity ratio was 1.78 +/- 0.43. After left ventricular reconstruction, the diastolic apical conicity ratio decreased to 1.47 +/- 0.