Dr. Mark D'Esposito

So there's still those memories that are in there, and they were making some type of contact that was helping them emotionally that you couldn't turn off with a drug.

So I think the more we do things like that, the more we'll be helpful for them, at least symptomatically.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, well, I don't know anything about nicotine staving off any neurodegenerative disorder, but nicotine was used in a number of early Alzheimer's studies just because of its effect on the cholinergic system.

So there is some truth to that.

The cholinergic system is dysfunctional in Alzheimer's disease, and boosting the cholinergic system probably is beneficial.

I mean, the patients that we give the anticholinergic inhibitors

There are some families that say, yeah, he's remembering more and he's just doing better.

So I've seen positive things to it.

It doesn't really slow the course of the disease.

That's the problem.

The disease just carries on even though we're symptomatically improving the symptoms.

But again, I think it's going to take both acetylcholine and something else.

I think we don't know.

Should we give dopamine with the nicotine or the acetylcholine?

Should we give norepinephrine?

I think it's going to be a cocktail, which, again, pharmaceutical companies have not tried a cocktail of neuromodulators for Alzheimer's disease.

They've just tried acetylcholine.

Yeah, that's a great question.

There was Emily Jacobs, who's a professor at UC Santa Barbara now in the psychology department, when she was a graduate student in my lab, studied the role of estrogen on working memory and dopaminergic function.