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Page last updated at 23:30 GMT, Sunday, 13 July 2008 00:30 UK
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Nicotine drug 'may slow dementia'

Nicotine can give the brain a boost
Nicotine-based drugs may help delay the moment a person with dementia has to enter a care home, say researchers.

Nicotine has toxic effects, and carries a strong risk of addiction, but scientists have shown it can also boost learning, memory and attention.

The effect is small, but it may help give dementia patients up to six extra months of independent living.

A team at King's College London have demonstrated the positive effects of nicotine in experiments on rats.

It may be possible for medicinal chemists to devise compounds that provide some of the beneficial effects of nicotine while cutting out the toxic effects

Professor Ian Stolerman
Institute of Psychiatry

They showed that nicotine boosted the animals' ability to carry out a task accurately - particularly when they were also distracted.

When able to give full concentration, the animals responded correctly to stimuli about 80% of the time. Nicotine boosted the accuracy rate by about 5%.

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