Intermittent electrical stimulation of an area deep inside the brain that degenerates in Alzheimer’s disease appears to improve working memory, scientists reported.

Conversely, continuous deep brain stimulation, like the type used for Parkinson’s and currently under study in humans with Alzheimer’s, impairs memory, according to study results in adult non-human primates reported in the journal Current Biology.

With intermittent stimulation – currently not used in any application in the brain in patients – the monkeys were able to remember things up to five times longer in a standard test of working memory.

In the new studies, scientists used the technique of placing hair-thin electrodes into the brain to deliver electricity and increase the activity of the nucleus basalis of Meynert, a small area in the forebrain that is inexplicably degenerated in both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

“The natural response of many brain systems to continuous input is to start to ignore the input,” said Dr. David T. Blake, neuroscientist in the Department of Neurology at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. In fact, constant stimulation in other areas like the globus pallidus garners desired clinical benefit like tremor reduction in Parkinson’s disease.

“In the case of Parkinson’s, deep brain stimulation is effectively downregulating that part of the brain,” said Blake, the study’s corresponding author. “What we wanted to do instead was to upregulate an area.”

Their goals included making more of the chemical messenger acetylcholine available in the region. The nucleus basalis has a large concentration of neurons that are connected to brain areas critical for memory and cognition, and under healthy conditions have a ready supply of acetylcholine that enables the important communication between them.

As we age, acetylcholine levels in the brain naturally decrease, but Alzheimer’s causes a dramatic multiplier effect that takes us from being forgetful to a different level, said Dr. Alvin V. Terry, chair of the MCG Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and a study coauthor.

They started with continuous stimulation, like the clinical approaches, and saw an unexpected decline in performance. Equally surprising, they found intermittent stimulation resulted in more available acetylcholine in the region and better performance.

In fact, use of the cholinesterase inhibitor donepezil restored memory performance in animals that received constant stimulation but had no impact on those whose memory was already enhanced by intermittent stimulation.

“Normally neurons don’t fire nonstop,” Terry noted. “They are pulsing if you will.”

Sixty pulses per second for 20 seconds followed by a 40-second interval without stimulation provided optimal benefit in the study.

The scientists suspect the benefit resulted from the impact of increased levels of acetylcholine directly on neurons and their supportive cells in that region. However it may also result from a slight increase in blood flow to the brain region, they write. Cholinesterase inhibitors, drugs used to treat Alzheimer’s, are known to increase blood flow to the brain about 10-15 percent in humans. Blood flow is typically reduced in Alzheimer’s.

The adult but not aged monkeys in the current study were already part of an investigation to determine whether stimulation could improve the sense of touch, which also decreases with age. The scientists realized that with stimulation the monkeys were able to detect finger taps essentially 100 percent of the time versus about 60 percent of the time without it.

So they also used a classic working memory task in which a colored square cue shows up, then disappears, followed by a delay and then a choice between a cue-colored square and a distractor square. The monkeys get a food reward for making the cue match.

“There was every