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American Morning
Memory Drugs
Aired August 27, 2003 - 08:44 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Do you sometimes forget the name of the person you just met? Sure. How about where you put your keys that morning? Seems like there's a pill for everything out there these days. How about your own memory?
Our medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen now joins us at the CNN Center to talk more about this.
Good morning, Elizabeth.
There are some pills out there, some drugs out there that claim to help your memory so far, right?
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, there are prescription pills out there, Bill, for Alzheimer's patients, and that's of course a whole different category of memory loss. Now what you might be thinking of is there are supplements that you can find in nutrition stores that claim to help memory, whether or not they do is a cause for debate.
But let's talk about Alzheimer's and how it's different from the kind of memory loss you were talking about, where you can't remember someone's name or something like that. There are basically three different categories of memory loss. The first is just normal memory loss that comes with aging that all of us have. It's not anything that is diagnosable. It's not anything that is actually a disease. The second one is a disease called mild cognitive impairment, where it's actually worse. It's much worse than what you would expect for someone your age, for someone of your education level, and the third one, as we said, is Alzheimer's Disease which is a whole different category.
Now I know a lot of people must be thinking, golly, how do I know the difference between just normal memory loss that comes with aging and this disease called mild cognitive impairment or MCI? And here's one way of looking at it, normal memory loss is where you go, oh gosh, I thought I put my wallet in that bag, but I put it in that bag, or man, I can't remember the name of that person who, you know, I met last week.
MCI is where you sit down and you read a paragraph and then you look up and someone asks you a question about the paragraph and you can't remember even though you just read the information a second ago. It's something that's much more an immediate sense of memory loss and something that's much more persistent that happens all the time.
Now there's one drug that is in the pipeline for Alzheimer's. It's called Mementine (ph), and the FDA is expected to make a ruling on it sometime later this year. And even though it's intended for Alzheimer's, some people think that it may help people with MCI, for which there are no drugs on the market right now. So some people think you could use it for people with MCI, and that's important because about 15 percent of people with MCI do go on to get Alzheimer's, so it would be important to try to slow the progression of the disease, because then it would slow the progression of Alzheimer's. I think it's also important to note that even the drugs that are on the market right now for Alzheimer's, they don't cure Alzheimer's, they just slow the progression of the disease -- Bill.
HEMMER: And we've talked in the past if you put the pills aside there are certain methods that you can do to try to maintain your memory from losing it. If these pills are eventually approved, is there a fear in the medical world that they could be abused?
COHEN: Oh, there definitely is a fear. There's a fear that college students who just want to do better on the test tomorrow, and they want to be able to remember more materials go to the doctor and say, gosh, I'm just forgetting everything, can you give me some of those pills? These are highly, highly abusable pills. Sort of like diet pills are also highly abusable. And so that's something doctors are going to have to be really cautious about.
HEMMER: Thanks, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Cohen at the CNN Center.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired August 27, 2003 - 08:44 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Do you sometimes forget the name of the person you just met? Sure. How about where you put your keys that morning? Seems like there's a pill for everything out there these days. How about your own memory?
Our medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen now joins us at the CNN Center to talk more about this.
Good morning, Elizabeth.
There are some pills out there, some drugs out there that claim to help your memory so far, right?
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, there are prescription pills out there, Bill, for Alzheimer's patients, and that's of course a whole different category of memory loss. Now what you might be thinking of is there are supplements that you can find in nutrition stores that claim to help memory, whether or not they do is a cause for debate.
But let's talk about Alzheimer's and how it's different from the kind of memory loss you were talking about, where you can't remember someone's name or something like that. There are basically three different categories of memory loss. The first is just normal memory loss that comes with aging that all of us have. It's not anything that is diagnosable. It's not anything that is actually a disease. The second one is a disease called mild cognitive impairment, where it's actually worse. It's much worse than what you would expect for someone your age, for someone of your education level, and the third one, as we said, is Alzheimer's Disease which is a whole different category.
Now I know a lot of people must be thinking, golly, how do I know the difference between just normal memory loss that comes with aging and this disease called mild cognitive impairment or MCI? And here's one way of looking at it, normal memory loss is where you go, oh gosh, I thought I put my wallet in that bag, but I put it in that bag, or man, I can't remember the name of that person who, you know, I met last week.
MCI is where you sit down and you read a paragraph and then you look up and someone asks you a question about the paragraph and you can't remember even though you just read the information a second ago. It's something that's much more an immediate sense of memory loss and something that's much more persistent that happens all the time.
Now there's one drug that is in the pipeline for Alzheimer's. It's called Mementine (ph), and the FDA is expected to make a ruling on it sometime later this year. And even though it's intended for Alzheimer's, some people think that it may help people with MCI, for which there are no drugs on the market right now. So some people think you could use it for people with MCI, and that's important because about 15 percent of people with MCI do go on to get Alzheimer's, so it would be important to try to slow the progression of the disease, because then it would slow the progression of Alzheimer's. I think it's also important to note that even the drugs that are on the market right now for Alzheimer's, they don't cure Alzheimer's, they just slow the progression of the disease -- Bill.
HEMMER: And we've talked in the past if you put the pills aside there are certain methods that you can do to try to maintain your memory from losing it. If these pills are eventually approved, is there a fear in the medical world that they could be abused?
COHEN: Oh, there definitely is a fear. There's a fear that college students who just want to do better on the test tomorrow, and they want to be able to remember more materials go to the doctor and say, gosh, I'm just forgetting everything, can you give me some of those pills? These are highly, highly abusable pills. Sort of like diet pills are also highly abusable. And so that's something doctors are going to have to be really cautious about.
HEMMER: Thanks, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Cohen at the CNN Center.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
