Dr. Mark D'Esposito

Is it a Parkinson's disease thing?

Is it Alzheimer's disease thing?

And this has been a general problem with neurology, it's very disease centric, it's always sort of focused on, you know, how can we develop a treatment for Alzheimer's or traumatic brain injury or stroke, as opposed to how can we develop a treatment for working memory dysfunction, which is a problem across.

diseases.

So the answer to your earlier question is these drugs are very safe.

We give them in such low doses to healthy individuals, they don't even know, they can't even tell the difference between the placebo and the drug.

Really?

They don't even know which one they're on.

They have no idea.

They don't even know their working memory is better until we show them that their working memory is better.

Love it.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's not specifically the drug.

I mean, the reason for bromocriptine is that it's the oldest and it's the one I was most comfortable with.

I had to be comfortable with it clinically before I'd give it to undergraduates at Penn or Berkeley, so there's nothing special.

But other agonists work similarly.

There's a drug that's developed, which is a COMT inhibitor, which actually inhibits this enzyme that we're talking about, and that also will improve, will have the same function.

There's been some work that norepinephrine also seems to be helpful with working memory.

It's maybe not as potent as the dopaminergic.

And that's the point I want to make, another disappointing thing about this whole field of the pharmacology of cognition.