Nicotine-based Drugs May Help Treat Dementia

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

The King's team, based at the Institute of Psychiatry, demonstrated the positive effects of nicotine in experiments on rats.

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 per cent of the time. Nicotine boosted the accuracy rate by about five per cent.

However, when distracted, the animals' success rate fell to about 55 per cent. In this case nicotine brought it back up to around the 85 per cent level. Researchers studied the mechanisms, which underpin the effects produced by nicotine.

Several nicotinic drugs are already in development, but the King's team hopes its work will speed up the discovery of agents, which give the brain a bigger boost than nicotine, with longer lasting effects.