LONDON: Schools and universities could soon be facing a different kind of drug problem: a rise in students taking brain-enhancing pills to boost their exam results.

UK government advisers have warned that new drugs to treat conditions as varied as Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit disorder, and narcolepsy are in danger of being misused by students to improve their grades.

The use of brain-boosting drugs, many of which are designed to improve memory and attention span in people with serious degenerative brain diseases, could become as big a problem for the education system as performance-enhancing drugs are in sport, the experts said.

The warning comes in a report from the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, which was commissioned by the British government in 2006 to survey the implications of expected progress in brain sciences and drug research. The report urges the government to be alert to the misuse of “cognitive-enhancers” and to prepare the ground for regulations and even urine tests to control their use in schools, universities and workplaces.

“Students using cognitive enhancers raises exactly the same issues as athletes using drugs to improve their performance. The risk is they could give people an unfair advantage in exams and examination results stand for a lot in this country,” said Professor Les Iversen, a pharmacologist at Oxford University, England, and co-author of the report.

Since the drugs are designed to be taken by people with dementia and other serious disorders, there is scant data on how safe or effective they are if taken by healthy people, the report warns.

The group of scientists behind the report identified six categories of drugs, already available on prescription, which claim to boost brain function. These include modafinil, which is used to treat narcolepsy, ritalin and related amphetamines for attention deficit disorder, and donepazil for Alzheimer’s disease.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service