Thursday, November 8, 2018

Diabetes Medications May Reduce Alzheimer’s Disease Severity

Ask your doctor and not politely; would this help in preventing Alzheimers? Your doctor and stroke hospital should be excited about this and raring to go to get research done on this preventing Alzheimers. At least they should be if they were competent at all. 

Diabetes Medications May Reduce Alzheimer’s Disease Severity


People with Alzheimer’s disease who were treated with diabetes drugs showed considerably fewer markers of the disease, including abnormal microvasculature and dysregulated gene expressions in their brains compared with patients with Alzheimer’s disease who did not receive treatment for diabetes, according to a study published in PLOS One.
The study is the first to examine what happens in the pathways of both brain tissue and endothelial cells in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease treated with diabetes medication.
Two previous studies on brain tissue found that the brains of people with both Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes had fewer Alzheimer’s lesions than the brains from people with Alzheimer’s disease without diabetes.
To determine what happens at the molecular level, researchers from Mount Sinai, New York, New York, developed a method to separate brain capillaries from the brain tissue of 34 people with Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes who had been treated with anti-diabetes drugs and compare them with tissue from 30 brains of people with Alzheimer’s without diabetes and 19 brains of people without Alzheimer’s or diabetes. They then examined the vessels and brain tissue separately to measure Alzheimer’s disease associated changes in molecular RNA markers for brain capillary cells and insulin signalling.
The levels of about half of these markers were reduced in the vessels and brain tissue in the group with Alzheimer’s and diabetes. The great majority of the RNA changes seen in Alzheimer’s disease were absent in those Alzheimer’s patients who had been treated with anti-diabetes drugs.
“The results of this study are important because they give us new insights for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” said senior author Vahram Haroutunian, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Most modern Alzheimer’s treatments target amyloid plaques and haven’t succeeded in effectively treating the disease. Insulin and diabetes medications such as metformin are FDA approved and safely administered to millions of people and appear to have a beneficial effect on people with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“This opens opportunities to conduct research trials on people using similar drugs or on drugs that have similar effects on the brains’ biological pathways and cell types identified in this study,” he said.
Reference: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206547
SOURCE: Mount Sinai Health System

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