by
Christina Hwang, Contributing Reporter | June 30, 2016
Mild cognitive impairment or
Alzheimer's patients may benefit most
from methylene blue Credit: RSNA
Methylene blue — which is used to treat methemoglobinemia, a blood disorder in which oxygen cannot be released properly into blood tissues — can be used to improve short-term memory and attention, new research has shown.
A team from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, set out to evaluate the effects of methylene blue on humans while they performed activities that involved memory and attention.
Their study was conducted on 26 individuals who were healthy and between the ages of 22 and 62. The participants underwent functional MRI (fMRI) before they orally took a placebo or methylene blue, and then underwent another fMRI scan one hour after.
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“They were asked to perform a memory recall task, an attention task, and a reaction time task,” study author Timothy Q. Duong, Ph.D., University of Texas Health Science center, told HCB News.
During the memory recall task, the participants who took the dose of methylene blue were seven percent more likely to correctly remember information than those who took the placebo.
For the short-term memory tasks, there was an increase in the response involving the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which controls the processing of memories; the parietal lobe, which processes sensory information; and the occipital cortex, the region where visuals are processed.
In the task that measured reaction time to a visual stimulus, the methylene blue increased the participant’s response time, which was seen in the bilateral insular cortex, an area in the brain that is associated with emotional responses.
“We are currently conducting double-blinded placebo-controlled, randomized chronic [methylene blue] treatment of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease patients,” Duong said. “This study will be unblinded later this year.”
He said that methylene blue is not expensive to produce and has been safely used to treat cyanide and carbon-monoxide poisoning in emergency rooms, and to treat chronic methemoglobinemia. He speculates that it could have a widespread impact if its efficacy were to be demonstrated on patients with memory disorders.
