NCT05065450

Amygdala Memory Enhancement

Mechanisms of Amygdala-Mediated Memory Enhancement in Humans

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 90 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Washington University School of Medicine · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 75 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The objective is to understand how amygdala activation affects other medial temporal lobe structures to prioritize long-term memories. The project is relevant to disorders of memory and to disorders involving affect and memory, including traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Detailed description

Direct electrical stimulation (DES) of the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA) can improve declarative memory, reflecting the role of the BLA in modulating memory processes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions as a function of emotional arousal. Thus, DES can reveal mechanisms of BLA-mediated memory enhancement relevant to human mental health and disease. DES of the BLA can be used to interrogate the function of memory circuits, especially how neuronal oscillations in the MTL support declarative memory. First, BLA is hypothesized to wield the capacity to prioritize long-term retention of information initially encountered adjacent in time over days and weeks after encoding. Second, the BLA preferentially projects to anterior MTL regions and thus is hypothesized to preferentially modulate memory processes in those anatomic regions, processes thought to support memory for non-spatial items more so than memory for spatial locations. Third, although emotional arousal, amygdala activity, MTL activity, and memory performance are typically correlated, the investigators hypothesize that DES will reveal that BLA outputs to other MTL regions cause improved memory performance by directly eliciting pro-memory oscillatory states in those networks. The expected outcomes represent a significant advancement for the basic science of normal memory function and significant movement towards novel therapeutics designed to emulate endogenous mechanisms of memory enhancement.

Conditions

• Brain Diseases
• Epilepsy
• Memory Disorders
• Traumatic Brain Injury
• Cognitive Impairment
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Intracranial Stimulation	Electrodes localized to the BLA will be stimulated with either active-BLAES (0.5-3.5 mA, theta-modulated gamma burst) electrical stimulation for a 1-sec duration immediately following item image presentation or sham-BLAES (zero-amplitude). At later stages of the project, stimulation parameters and timing will be varied and triggered not at random, but by real-time closed-loop analysis of memory biomarkers in the medial temporal lobe.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-11-01
• Primary completion: 2026-11-01
• Completion: 2027-11-01
• First posted: 2021-10-04
• Last updated: 2025-07-17

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study