Can a Pill Make You Smarter?

 

 

Many young adults utilise prescription-free attention enhancers to help them study and stay on track at work. However, new study reveals that such focus pill provide minimal and only temporary – benefits to healthy adults while endangering their cognitive health in the long run. Taking focus-enhancing medications without a prescription may cause more harm than good, according to new research. "Adderall and other stimulants  are the ideal pharmacological partner in a society that values production above all else," writes a short piece published in The Lancet last year. The makers of this medication designed it to help people with these illnesses stay alert and attentive.

However, an increasing number of healthy young people are obtaining and using this and comparable pills to focus as a means of "hacking" their brains to improve performance while working or studying. According to a 2016 study conducted by experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD, nonprescribed Adderall use grew by 67% among young adults in the United States over a 6-year period. "Healthy people who use focus pills psychostimulants for cognitive improvement may incur unanticipated costs to cognitive processes that rely on adequate sleep," says lead author Lauren Whitehurst. "While psychostimulants may somewhat reduce natural attentional degradation throughout the day, their usage also disrupts sleep and post-sleep executive performance."

The researchers recruited healthy adult volunteers for two sets of studies

The first was to look at how psychostimulants affected cognitive performance, particularly focus, and the second was to look at how these medicines affected sleep and working memory, which is the type of memory we use every day to make decisions. At the start of the trial, all participants were given memory and attention tests so that the researchers could evaluate how these baseline data compared to the final results.A week later, the treatments were switched so that each individual received both.

The team's findings were reported in two distinct study articles.

The first, published in the journal Cognition, examines dextroamphetamine's effects on attention span, while the second, published in Behavioural Brain Research, examines the drug's effects on sleep and working memory. The researchers examined the outcomes of 43 healthy subjects aged 18-35 years in order to determine how the medication impacts attention.

The researchers discovered that whether a volunteer took the placebo or the dextroamphetamine, their attention tended to wane throughout the day. People who got the stimulant exhibited superior short-term focus than those who received the placebo. These participants' attentional performance was 4% better than the control group 75 minutes after receiving the medication.

Benefits

They were also more focused than at the start. However, participants no longer noticed any benefits 12 or 24 hours after taking this medicine. "Our findings show that the alleged enhancement to executive function from psychostimulants in healthy people may be overstated," says co-author Sara Mednick.

The medication has an impact on memory and sleep. The researchers collected data from 46 healthy people aged 18-39 years to learn about dextroamphetamine's effects on sleep and working memory. In this scenario, the researchers discovered that the individuals' working memory performance was the same at both the 75-minute and 12-hour intervals, regardless of whether they had received dextroamphetamine or a placebo.

However, after 24 hours, including a night's sleep, participants who got the stimulant began doing significantly poorer on working memory tasks than those who received a placebo. Furthermore, nightly brain activity scans and sleep quality assessments revealed that dextroamphetamine recipients slept less and had poorer quality sleep than peers in the control group.