Scientists Back Brain Drugs for Healthy People

NEW YORK -- Healthy people should have the right to boost their brains with pills, such as those prescribed for hyperactive kids or memory-impaired older people, several scientists contend in a provocative commentary.

College students already illegally take prescription stimulants such as Ritalin to help them study, and demand for such drugs is likely to grow elsewhere, these experts say.

"We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function," and doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night's sleep, they wrote in an opinion piece published online Sunday by the journal Nature.

The commentary calls for more research and a variety of steps for managing the risks.

As more effective brain-boosting pills are developed, demand for them is likely to grow among middle-aged people who want youthful memory powers and multitasking workers who need to keep track of multiple demands, said one author of the commentary, Martha Farah, a brain scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Almost everybody is going to want to use it," she said.

Another author, Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, declared in an e-mail, "I would be the first in line if safe and effective drugs were developed that trumped caffeine."

The seven authors, from the U.S. and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York.

Two of the authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.

Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn't impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.

"It's a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don't have an illness of any kind," Turner said.

The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 U.S. college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.

"It's a felony, but it's being done," Farah said.

The stimulants Adderall and Ritalin are prescribed mainly for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but they can help other people focus their attention and handle information in their heads, the commentary says.

Another drug, Provigil, is approved for sleep disorders but is also prescribed for healthy people who need to stay alert when sleep- deprived, the commentary says. Lab studies show that it can also perk up the brains of well-rested people. And some drugs developed for Alzheimer's disease also provide a modest memory boost, it says.

Ritalin is made by a Swiss company, Novartis AG, but the drug is also available generically.

Adderall is made by Shire PLC of Great Britain and Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Montvale, N.J., and some formulations are also available generically. Provigil is made by Cephalon Inc. of Frazer, Pa.

Although they supported the concept that healthy adults should be able to use brain-boosting drugs, the authors called for:

• More research into the use, benefits and risks of such drugs. Much is unknown about them, such as the risk of dependency when used for this purpose, the commentary said.
• Policies to guard against people being coerced into taking them. 
• Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse. 
• Action by doctors, educators and others to develop policies on the use of such drugs by healthy people. 
• Legislative action to allow drug companies to market the drugs to healthy people if they meet regulatory standards for safety and effectiveness.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said she agreed with the commentary that the nonprescribed use of brain-boosting drugs must be studied.

But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said.

"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said.

Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y., said the commentary makes a convincing case that "we ought to be opening this up for public scrutiny and public conversation."

One challenge will be finding ways to protect people against subtle coercion to use the drugs, the kind of thing parents feel when neighbor kids sign up for SAT prep courses, he said.

Originally published by Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press.