Image - (2017) Volume 2, Issue 2
Eugen Tarnow*
Data Scientist and Director of Consulting, Avalon Business Systems, 19-03 Maple Avenue, Fair Lawn, NJ 07410, USA
Received date: June 28, 2017; Accepted date: June 30, 2017; Published date: July 05, 2017
Citation: Tarnow E (2017) Pharmacological Models for Short Term Memory Deficiency in Alzheimer ’s Disease: First Scopolamine Then Diazepam?. Dual Diagn Open Acc Vol 2:32.
Copyright: © 2017 Tarnow E. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The signature of a drug or disease on the serial position curve of free recall is the item-by-item difference compared with placebo. Early Alzheimer’s disease (average MMSE=26) has one signature, a positive slope, and somewhat later (average MMSE=20) a zero slope (Figure 1). The free recall signatures of scopolamine and diazepam are shown in (Figures 2 and 3), respectively. Scopolamine shows a positive slope, and diazepam, a zero slope. In the limited context of free recall, scopolamine acts as pharmacological model of early Alzheimer’s disease and diazepam of later Alzheimer’s disease. [1-4].
Figure 1: Changes in the free recall serial position curve as Alzheimer’s disease progresses from normal to very mild (MMSE<24) and very mild to mild (MMSE ≥ 24).
Figure 2: Top panel- Change in serial position curve from scopolamine (intravenous 5.7 Mg/kg) in a serial recall experiment (Frith et al. 1984) scored with and without order information. The signature is similar to early AD. Bottom panel: Change in serial position curve from scopolamine (intravenous 0.4 mg) from Crowe & Grove-White (1973). The signatures are the same for the two conditions in each experiment. Note the medium R2.
Figure 3: Change in serial position curve from diazepam only (intravenous 5.7 mg/kg) in a serial recall experiment (Frith et al. 1984) scored with and without order information. Note the low R2.
