Some oriental medicine turned out to have a significant clinical effect on the cure for dementia. Therefore, thorough scientific tests for physiological effect of oriental medicne are needed. This study is aimed at doing experimental studies on the effects of two medicines, Jowiseungcheongtang and hyungbangjihwangtang, on the cure for dementia.
For the demonstration of the effect of the two medicines on aged rats, we perfomed a radial arm medicines on aged rats, water maze task, known for their proper learning paradigm for behavior.
Previous studies on aging and dementia show that aged rats displayed significant impariments in the learning of the radial arm maze task compared with younger rats. As in experiment 1, we found that the learning of the radial arm maze task compared with younger rats. As in experiment 1, we found that the learning deficits aged rats exhibit in radial arm maze task were improved with the application of each medicine. The resutls suggest that these two medicine can be effective to patients whose working or shortterm memory is impaired.
In experiment 2 we studied the effect of the two medicines on the deficit of the aged rats with the Morris water maze task known for measuring long-tern memory. We did not find significant results between the performance of the ages rats and the younger ones. Considered the different results previous studies have reported, more thorough studies are needed to investigate the effect of the medicines on long-term memory.
In conclusion, the results we found in experiment 1 and 2 suggest that Jowisengcheongtang and hyungbangjihwangtang can have useful effects for the cure of age-related memory (especially for short-term memory)
deficits. Recent interests in dementia urges researchers concerned to explore the effect of oriental few behavioral or scientific studies on dementia using oriental medicine to date, further studies are expected are expected to continue to elucidate "what the wisdom of the oriental medicine tells about dementia".
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