Interesting Article...Thoughts?

This week I received an article from one of my friends who looks at my blog occasionally. The article titled, "New Drugs May Transform Down Syndrome" by Jenni Laidman discussed an interesting new discovery in which geneticist  Roger Reeves, from Johns Hopkins University, and his team gave mice with the Down syndrome a pharmaceutical drug to try and regain the size of a cerebellum to it's typical mass. The article explains that individuals with Down syndrome have a cerebellum that is about 40% smaller than the typical size. The cerebellum in the brain has major effects on a person's motor skills and balance. Roger Reeves and his team were hoping to try and regain size in the cerebellum to discover some major features of Down syndrome, but instead they came across an unexpected finding. Three months after the drug intervention, the mice with Down syndrome showed improved learning and memory functioning (shown by the mice's ability to navigate around a water maze). The team did not think that the drug would impact this functioning of the mice and were therefore surprised to come across such results. The researchers are not sure whether or not they may have accidentally repaired the hippocampus, which typically takes on the role of assisting in memory and learning and may have caused the increased memory and learning, but they do know that in previous studies a different chemical pathway in the hippocampus is typically explored. The clinical implications for this study, if the pharmaceutical drug has an effect on cerebellum in such a way, is that individuals with Down syndrome in the future could be prescribed with this medication to help in leading more independent lives due to the effects the medication would have on their brain functioning.

This article is extremely interesting because I had no idea that this kind of research was being done on this population. It really shows how far we have come over the years especially in the field of genetics. I am not sure how comfortable I personally would be in giving my child the medication, but I guess just like any other prescription medication it would have to go through a lot of testing to make sure it is safe for a multitude of people to consume. The general concept behind the pharmaceutical drug is very interesting and I do hope that more research is done on this topic to give people more information.

Check out the article HERE!