Can a Pill Make People With Down Syndrome Smarter? Last summer, the magazine published an article by Dan Hurley about Dr. Alberto Costa, a researcher and an associate professor at the University of Colorado, who has a daughter with Down syndrome and who was then conducting a study to see whether a particular drug, memantine, can improve the intellectual abilities of adults with the syndrome. Results of the study are being published in the August issue of the journal Translational Psychiatry. We asked Hurley, who wrote about whether you can make yourself smarter through memory training in our Health issue, to characterize the results of Costa's study. He writes: Alberto Costa previously published a study in mice with the equivalent of Down syndrome, showing that the Alzheimer's drug memantine almost immediately normalized their ability to learn and remember. The new study, involving 40 young adults with Down syndrome, was far less definitive. Both before and after taking either memantine or a placebo for 16 weeks, the participants underwent a battery of tests of their intellectual abilities. First the bad news: of the 14 cognitive measures tested before and after treatment, those taking memantine only did significantly better than those taking a placebo on a single test. And it was not one of the two "primary" measures designated by Costa before the study began. The good news, however, is that this is the first time any drug study of Down syndrome showed a statistically significant benefit on any measure of cognition. Moreover, the trends, although falling short of statistical significance, favored memantine over placebo on 13 of the 14 measures. "This is the first study demonstrating a pharmacological effect on cognition in Down syndrome patients, and it was performed using an F.D.A.-approved drug with very few clinically relevant complications," said Tarik Haydar, Ph.D., a Down syndrome researcher at Boston University. At the very least, this study should provide a sound justification for further, broader testing of memantine. Because the study was so small and the results so modest, Haydar and others emphasized that it would be unwise for people with Down syndrome, their families or physicians to consider taking memantine before much more research is done. "We still do not know if we have something that will actually work," said Alcino J. Silva, professor of neurobiology, psychiatry and psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles. Even so, Silva added: "In my mind, the big story here is that for the first time we have a logical path that can take us from a mental health problem like Down syndrome into the development of targeted treatments. This is indeed a big deal.