Safer treatments for attention deficit disorder
“The more you know about a drug’s action in the brain, the better able you’ll be to come up with a safer alternative that does the same thing. Otherwise, you’re just randomly pulling compounds off the shelf and hoping they work.”
Craig Berridge
Professor of Psychology
Since the 1950s, doctors have been ordering medications like Ritalin to ease symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and prescriptions now number in the millions. Still, though highly effective, these so-called “psychostimulant” drugs are not without risks, leaving many seeking safer alternatives, especially for children.
Before we can develop alternatives, however, we need to know how the current drugs work in the brain to calm behavior and focus attention, says psychology professor Craig Berridge. “It’s very surprising,” he says, “but though we’ve used these drugs for half a century and today they’re prescribed in very high numbers, the biological mechanisms that drive their therapeutic effects are only poorly understood.”
Looking to neurons for answers
To begin uncovering those mechanisms, Berridge’s team of seed grant recipients will go straight to the source of behavior: the brain’s neurons themselves. Berridge found earlier that clinically relevant doses of Ritalin primarily target the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region of the brain associated with higher cognition, such as attention and working memory, and impulse control. In animals performing cognitive tasks, his team will now record the activity of populations of PFC neurons and watch how this changes when low doses of Ritalin are administered.
The Team
Principal Investigator
- Craig Berridge, Psychology
Investigators
- Matt Andrzejewski, Psychology
- David Devilbiss, Psychology
- Rick Jenison, Psychology
- Luis Populin, Anatomy
Berridge expects the patterns that emerge will provide basic new insights into the brain basis of cognition, as well as a roadmap drug developers can follow in the search for therapeutic compounds to replace Ritalin.
“The advantage of this approach is that the more you know about a drug’s action in the brain, the better able you’ll be to come up with a safer alternative that does the same thing,” he says. “Otherwise, you’re just randomly pulling compounds off the shelf and hoping they work.”
Berridge credits the seed grant program for coalescing the diverse mix of talents needed to carry out the project. The team includes researchers with expertise in neuronal recordings, cognitive testing of animals and the new, advanced mathematics required to model the activities of 10 to 30 neurons at once and relate those patterns to behavior.
“This project absolutely could not have proceeded without seed grant funding,” Berridge says. “What we’re most excited about is that we actually get to do this project. Otherwise, it probably would have been one of those ideas we just talked about and wished we could have done.”
The other team members are psychology professor Rick Jenison, anatomy professor Luis Populin, and staff scientists Matt Andrzejewski and David Devilbiss.