Concerned about your memory? New research has found that\nincreasing histamine levels in your brain might help your long-term memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of us know histamine for its role in allergies. But it\nalso helps regulate the functions of your gut and serves as a neurotransmitter\nin your brain. That\u2019s why we take antihistamines\u2014drugs that reduce histamine\nlevels\u2014during allergy season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there are also drugs that increase histamine levels,\nwhich are often used to treat dizziness. It\u2019s these histamine-boosting drugs\nthat may be used to help memory someday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A new study from the University of Tokyo asked 38\nparticipants in their mid-20 to memorize images of everyday objects. Then they\nhad the men and women come back several days later to look at more images. Some\nwere those they had seen previously, others were new images added to the mix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
About a week later, the participants returned and took either\na drug that increased histamine levels in their brain or a placebo. Then they\ntook the test again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The histamine helped boost long-term memory for the men and women with poorer memories but those who already had a good memory actually saw a decrease after taking the histamines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How would histamine affect the participants in two very\ndifferent ways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to the researchers, there\u2019s something called\n\u201cstochastic resonance\u201d which helps boost signals that are too weak for a sensor\nto detect. The theory is that stored memories that are normally inaccessible\ncan be retrieved once histamines help trigger the neurons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But for those who already have firing neurons, the histamine\nproduces too much \u201cwhite noise\u201d that hinders memory recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Professor Yuji Ikegaya has a warning for people who are\nthinking about trying to get a histamine-boosting drug to improve their memory:\n\u201cTo any students thinking about using this drug as a study aid, I must warn\nthem to first always protect their health, and second, to realize that we have\nnot tested whether this drug helps anyone learn or memorize new things.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A new study found that for some people, taking a histamine booster helped improve long-term memory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[690],"tags":[823,737,946,947,889],"class_list":["post-13251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wellness","tag-aging","tag-allergies","tag-allergy","tag-histamine","tag-memory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}