JPR: What's new! Melatonin may be expected to help enhance brain memory!

December 14, 2020 // -- Walking up to the shelves of your local pharmacy, you'll find that fish oil, ginkgo, vitamin E, and ginseng are now touted as memory enhancers that can help prevent cognitive decline in the body, and you'll find that melatonin is often sold in the U.S. as a sleep supplement, and now it seems that melatonin salespeoes may need to rethink their use.
In a recent study published in the international journal Journal of Pineal Research, scientists from Tokyo Medical and Dental University and others found that melatonin and its two metabolites may help the body's memory stay in the brain and may protect mice and humans from cognitive decline in the brain.
Photo Source: One of the easiest ways to test a mouse's memory at Tokyo Medical and Dental University is to rely on its natural tendency to examine unfamiliar objects, and if so, mice spend more time examining unfamiliar objects than familiar ones.
trick is to remember something if you want it to become familiar.
like humans, mice's cognitive decline was mainly due to poor memory, and when they were tested for cognitive tasks on new things, they behaved as if both objects were new.
researchers are curious about melatonin metabolites, the molecules that break down when they enter the body, and researcher Attori explains that we all know that melatonin can be converted into N1-acetyl-N2-methyl-methoxygenide (AFMK) in the brain. And N1-acetyl-5-methyl canine urine amine (AMK) molecules, which may promote brain cognition, were tested by researchers who familiarized mice with objects and injected them with a dose of melatonin and two metabolites an hour later.
The researchers then tested the memory of the mice the next day and found that the mice's body's memory improved after treatment, and that AMK was the most effective, with the three substances accumulating in the brain's hema body, an area that is important for converting the body's experience into memory.
For young mice, touching an object three times a day was enough to make the object remembered by the mouse during a new object recognition mission the next day; in contrast, older mice behaved as if both objects were new and unfamiliar, a sign of cognitive decline; however, giving a dose of AMK 15 minutes after a single contact allowed older mice to remember the objects four days later.
Finally, the researchers found that long-term memory formation in the body's brain is not enhanced when melatonin is blocked from being converted into AMK molecules, and that AMK, a metabolite of melatonin, promotes memory formation in the brains of mice of all ages; The impact is exciting for researchers, who hope to see similar effects in older people later in life through more in-depth studies; if so, AMK therapy could eventually be used to reduce the severity of the disease in people with mild cognitive impairment and hopefully to treat Alzheimer's disease.
() Original source: Hikaru Iwashita, Yukihisa Matsumoto, Yusuke Maruyama, et al. The melatonin metabolite N1‐acetyl‐5‐methoxykynuramine facilitates long‐term object memory in young and aging mice, Journal of Pineal Research (2020). DOI: 10.1111/jpi.12703。