Abstract
Since the early studies of Deutsch (1), the non-selective muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine has been used as a drug that impairs memory performance in man. The notion that scopolamine could be used as a pharmacological model of age-associated memory impairment and dementia further strengthened the cholinergic hypothesis of geriatric memory dysfunction by Bartus et al. (2). Since then, a vast amount of studies applied this model to induce memory impairments in young healthy subjects to model age-related memory disorders. At present, scopolamine is still considered to be the best model for inducing cognitive impairments in healthy subjects (3). Scopolamine is therefore used as a pharmacological model to test novel cognition-enhancing drugs in animals [e.g., Ref. (4–6)] and in humans [e.g., Ref. (7, 8)]. In clinical trials, scopolamine is in particular being used as a model for AD in which novel cognition-enhancing drugs are tested (see https://ClinicalTrials.gov).
Highlights
Reviewed by: Antonio Pisani, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy Santiago J
The notion that scopolamine could be used as a pharmacological model of age-associated memory impairment and dementia further strengthened the cholinergic hypothesis of geriatric memory dysfunction by Bartus et al [2]
Scopolamine is considered as a golden standard for cholinergic deficits and the existing data were used as a reference for evaluating novel cognition-enhancing drugs
Summary
Reviewed by: Antonio Pisani, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy Santiago J. Since the early studies of Deutsch [1], the non-selective muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine has been used as a drug that impairs memory performance in man. Scopolamine is used as a pharmacological model to test novel cognition-enhancing drugs in animals [e.g., Ref. Further efforts have been made to compare human and animal data with scopolamine to further validate the scopolamine as a model of cognitive impairments.
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