Innovation of Neuropsychopharmacological Experimental Methods to Investigate Attention in Human Participants and Its Validation by Randomized Double Blind Placebo Controlled Clinical Trial

Abstract

In terms of advancement of life to meet the challenges new method for neuropsychopharmacological research are continually developing to ensure superior safety, accuracy, efficacy, precision etc. In this experiment, we suggested and validated two neuropsychopharmacological testing methods, these are Numeral Finding (NF) and Typo Revealing (TR) tests for the determination of attention in healthy aged human participants. The objective of this experiment was to generate more effective testing methods for the assessment of attention in human. The rationality of the aforementioned methods was checked by a randomized double blind placebo controlled clinical trial for the period of 21 days among healthy aged human participants. The experiment was conducted at Gazipur Sadar, Gazipur-1703, Dhaka, Bangladesh between the period of December 2015 and March 2016. The experiment center was the Department of Pharmacy, Southeast University, Dhaka-1213, Bangladesh. In this experiment, 60 healthy male participants between the age ranges of 40 to 50 years old were selected and randomly divided by simple randomization process into 3 groups with 20 participants in each. Ginkgo biloba standardized extract’s capsule (Giloba? and Kobi?) was used as a standard and as a placebo control psyllium seed husk (i.e., seed of the Plantago ovata) was used after filling in the hard gelatin capsule shell (size 0). Group 1 was treated with Giloba? in which each capsule contained 120 mg Ginkgo biloba standardized extract (GBG) and group 2 was treated with Kobi? in which each capsule contained 60 mg Ginkgo biloba standardized extract (GBK). The treatment procedure for group 3 was psyllium seed husk’s capsule that served as placebo control (PC). Throughout the experiment each capsule was administered 3 times daily. Treatment with Ginkgo biloba standardized extracts for successive days markedly increased the attention of the participants with respect to PC group. In the NF test, administration of GBG and GBK extracts significantly (P < 0.05, P < 0.01; P < 0.01) increased the attention of the participants on 14th and 21st day as compared to that of PC group. For TR test treatment with GBG and GBK extracts markedly (P < 0.01; P < 0.001, P < 0.01) increased the attention of the participants on 14th and 21st day with respect to PC group. The existing experiment proved that NF and TR tests undoubtedly revealed the attention enhancing activity of the Ginkgo biloba standardized extracts in healthy aged human participants. Consequently, the recommended newly emerging methods can be used for the assessment of attention in human and will create a miracle in the domain of neuroscience.