A recent study has managed to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice by administering drugs currently used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure) and inflammation in humans.
Scientists at IRB Barcelona characterize the molecular features of three distinct stages of Alzheimer’s disease – initial, intermediate and advanced – thus providing a novel perspective and differentiating the disease from physiological aging.
For each of these stages, they have analyzed the behavior of the animals, studied the effects on the brain (specifically the hippocampus at the tissue level) and performed a molecular analysis to measure gene expression and protein levels.
“What we have observed is that, although Alzheimer’s disease shares some features of accelerated ageing, it is also affected by totally different ageing processes,” says Dr. Aloy. “This disease is caused by the abnormal accumulation of certain proteins, and we have seen that, in some cases, this is not caused by overproduction but by an error in their removal,” he adds.
Four drugs—two non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and two anti-hypertensives, proved effective at reversing the disease and neutralizing symptoms in these mice.
ICREA researcher Dr. Patrick Aloy (in the photo), head of the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology lab at IRB Barcelona, has headed a study that has managed to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice by administering drugs currently used to treat hypertension and inflammation in humans.
“Epidemiological studies already indicated that people who regularly take anti-inflammatories show a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Dr. Aloy, “but this had not been correlated with a specific medication or mechanism. The results that we are publishing are most promising, and we hope that further research can be done on them because they could give rise to a paradigm shift in the treatment of this disease.”
In addition to paving new avenues of research for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, the characterisation of the distinct stages of this condition published in this study favours early diagnosis. Diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage, when damage to the brain is still minimal, is one of the main research focuses to tackle this condition and to reduce symptoms.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia in Western societies and it is estimated that 24 million people worldwide have this condition