Dopamine drugs for Parkinson’s disease can also help elderly people who are unable to make decisions, British researchers have reported.
Researchers at University College London say loss of decision-making power is part of the normal process of ageing – but some people suffer especially badly.
A study reported in Nature Neuroscience showed how giving the drug L-dopa to volunteers in their early 70s helped improve their ability to make decisions.
The researchers had first proved the volunteers had lost decision-making ability by comparing them with healthy volunteers in their 20s.
They say that dopamine helps humans to learn from experience by comparing the real rewards of a course of action with the expected rewards.
Researcher Dr Rumana Chowdhury said: "The older volunteers who were less able to predict the likelihood of a reward from their decisions, and so performed worst in the task, showed a significant improvement following drug treatment."
Dr John Williams, of the Wellcome Trust, which backed the research, said it was "careful investigation."
He said: "That the team were able to reverse these changes by manipulating dopamine levels offers the hope of therapeutic approaches that could allow older people to function more effectively in the wider community."
R. Chowdhury et al. Dopamine restores reward prediction errors in old age. Nature Neuroscience 24 March 2013.
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