Se-Hyun Pyun1, Young Kyu Kwon1, Bombi Lee2, Chae Ha Yang1,
          Jin Kyung Oh2, Hyun-Jung Park3, Kwang-Ho Pyun3, Insop Shim3

1Dept. of Physiology, College of Oriental Medicine, Daegu Haany Univ., Daegu, 2Dept. of Oriental Med. Science, Graduate School of East-West Med. Science, Kyung Hee University, Suwon, 3Dept. of Integrative Medicine, College of Medicine, The Catholic University, Korea.

Chongmyungtang is a traditional Korean medicinal formula mixing three crude drugs including Hoelen, Polygalae Radix and Acori Rhizoma, which has been clinically treated for mild dementia. In order to investigate the therapeutic effect of Chongmyungtang(CM) and Chongmyungtang plus Cervi Cornu Parvum (CC) on cognitive function, we examined the effect of CM and CC on the stress-induced impairments of learning and memory that were observed in the Morris water maze for rats. The SD rats were randomly divided into four groups; the non-stressed normal, saline-pretreated immobilization-stressed (Control group, 2 hrs per day for 3 weeks), CM- or CC-pretreated immobilization-stressed groups. Daily administrations of CM (100mg/kg, p.o.) and CC (100mg/kg, p.o.) for 21 consecutive days produced significant reversals of stress-induced learning and memory deficit in the spatial learning task. In the ChAT immunohistochemistry, a functional marker of cholinergic neurons, the numbers of ChAT positive cells in the medial septum and the hippocampus in CM group were significantly increased in comparison with Control group. These results demonstrated that CM and CC ameliorated learning and memory deficits partly through neuroprotective effects on the central acetylcholine system. The results of our study suggest that Chongmyungtang and Chongmyungtang plus Cervi Cornu Parvum may have clinical benefit in dementia.