Brain Boost Drugs Hamper Sleep And Memory With Little Upside

Brain Boost Drugs Hamper Sleep And Memory With Little Upside

Taking nonprescribed psychostimulants may slightly improve a person’s short-term focus but impede sleep and mental functions that rely on it—such as working memory.

The use of prescription stimulants by those without medically diagnosed conditions marks a growing trend among young adults—particularly college students seeking a brain boost.

“Healthy individuals who use psychostimulants for cognitive enhancement may incur unintended costs to cognitive processes that depend on good sleep,” says lead author Lauren Whitehurst, a former graduate student in the Sleep and Cognition Lab at University of California, Irvine,who’s now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

“Our research shows that while psychostimulants may mildly curb natural attentional deterioration across the day, their use also disturbs sleep and post-sleep executive function.”


 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

Psychostimulants vs. placebo

The study included 43 people between 18 and 35 years old. Before receiving any medication, they completed baseline working memory and attention tasks. For the latter, participants had to track several moving circles on a screen for a short period of time. For working memory, researchers asked them to remember and manipulate a set of letters while performing simple math equations and then after a short retention interval, recall all the letters.

In one subsequent 9 AM lab visit, researchers gave subjects an inactive placebo pill; in another, they got 20 milligrams of dextroamphetamine—a drug in the same class of psychostimulants as Adderall. At 75-minute, 12-hour, and 24-hour intervals after each dose, participants repeated the attention and working memory tasks—spending the night in private rooms in the lab, where their brain activity was measured via electroencephalography.

“Our research suggests that the purported enhancement to executive function from psychostimulants in healthy populations may be somewhat exaggerated, as we found only minor daytime improvement in attention and no benefit to working memory,” says coauthor Sara Mednick, associate professor of cognitive sciences and director of the Sleep and Cognition Lab.

“In addition, we noted a large impairment to nighttime sleep, even though the medication was administered in the morning. Psychostimulants also led to detrimental consequences to cognitive functions that rely on good sleep. Thus, people who are taking these drugs to perform better in school or at work may feel as though they are doing better, but our data don’t support this feeling.”

Pay attention

The researchers discovered that attentional performance deteriorated throughout the day whether subjects received the dextroamphetamine or the placebo—an important finding that may help guide future studies on attention.

Researchers also determined that when participants ingested dextroamphetamine, they did about 4% better on the attentional task 75 minutes later than did the placebo group—and than they themselves had done during baseline testing. This small boost was not reflected in the 12- or 24-hour test, after sleep.

For working memory, on the other hand, subjects who had taken the stimulant performed the same as those who had taken the placebo on the 75-minute and 12-hour tests. But 24 hours after ingestion, the dextroamphetamine group did markedly worse on the test than did the placebo group, and overnight EEG and polysomnography measurements showed significant reductions in total sleep time and quality for those given the stimulant.

The working memory findings have been published online in Behavioural Brain Research. Additional coauthors are from UC Irvine and UC Riverside.

The attention findings appear in Cognition. Coauthors are from UC Irvine, UC Riverside, the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, and Harvard Medical School.

Support for this research came, in part, from the Office of Naval Research and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Source: UC Irvine

books_herbs

More By This Author

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES

English Afrikaans Arabic Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Filipino Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Malay Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese

follow InnerSelf on

facebook icontwitter iconyoutube iconinstagram iconpintrest iconrss icon

 Get The Latest By Email

Weekly Magazine Daily Inspiration

Sunday, 23 May 2021 08:15

We sometimes need to use antibiotics to treat sick animals, but taking advantage of opportunities to reduce antibiotics use could benefit everyone

Monday, 24 May 2021 08:28

There are many valid theories to explain the global appeal of cats, including our obsession with watching videos of them online. In terms of cats’ pure entertainment value, however, our...

Friday, 28 July 2023 17:45

Respiratory viruses like influenza virus (flu), SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) can make us sick by infecting our respiratory system, including the nose, upper...

Monday, 07 June 2021 08:07

Injury to the adult brain is all too common. A brain injury will often show up on brain scans as a well-defined area of damage. But often the changes to the brain extend far beyond the visible...

Tuesday, 20 April 2021 08:05

Wild bees are essential for sustaining the landscapes we love. A healthy community of wild pollinators ensures that most flowering plants have an A-team pollinator species and a reserve bench of...

Saturday, 15 May 2021 16:24

There exist several approaches to obtaining optimal health, all of them important, each of them acting in some way on all the aspects of our beings. I know that if a technique were valid for...

New Attitudes - New Possibilities

InnerSelf.comClimateImpactNews.com | InnerPower.net
MightyNatural.com | WholisticPolitics.com | InnerSelf Market
Copyright ©1985 - 2021 InnerSelf Publications. All Rights Reserved.