Has a treatment for Alzheimer's been sitting on pharmacy shelves for decades?

[NJCher]

Scientists have two possible candidates.

snip

Two drugs approved decades ago not only counteract brain damage caused by Alzheimer's disease in animal models, the same therapeutic combination may also improve cognition.

Sounds like a slam dunk in terms of a cure—but not yet. Researchers currently are concentrating on animal studies amid implications that remain explosive: If a surprising drug combination continues to destroy a key feature of the disease, then an effective treatment for Alzheimer's may have been hiding for decades in plain sight.

A promising series of early studies is highlighting two well known medicine cabinet standbys—gemfibrosil, an old-school cholesterol-lowering drug, and retinoic acid, a vitamin A derivative. Gemfibrosil, is sold as Lopid and while it's still used, it is not widely prescribed. Doctors now prefer to prescribe statins to lower cholesterol. Retinoic acid has been used in various formulations to treat everything from acne to psoriasis to cancer.

The two drugs are being studied for their robust impact on the brain and a potential new role that could one day thrust them into fighting what is now an incurable brain disease. Both medications have an uncanny capability to zero in on the brain's astrocytes, cells that originally got their name because they look like stars. But astrocytes are intimately involved in a key process that progressively—and insidiously—destroys the brain.

snip

Link: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-treatment-alzheimer-pharmacy-shelves-decades.html

[Joinfortmill]

1. Wow

[calimary]

2. Hmmmmm - most interesting.

[Jack-o-Lantern]

3. Fingers crossed.

[Gore1FL]

4. I lost a parent and her parents to this. I figure it's waiting in the wings for me.

Obviously, I am hopeful for progress such as this.

[bahboo]

5. please, please, please....

[Hekate]

6. Soon, please

[Demovictory9]

7. Good news maybe

[Bayard]

8. Make it so

My Mom had Alzheimer's, so the older I get, the more I obsess about my memory.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. A lot of people already take cholesterol lowering drugs.

Wouldn't it be stunningly obvious if that prevented Alzheimer's? Okay, so I understand this references a non-statin drug, but even so. This is exactly the kind of extremely preliminary results that we all need to be very wary of.

[NJCher]

13. I think

It works differently than a statin.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. I gather that's the case.

But it does seem as if this is very preliminary results, and I'm so tired of reading enthusiastic articles about how something or another totally eliminates some disease in mice, and in the end has zero effect on humans. Again, I know this is not the "eliminates the disease in mice" version, but I still feel cautious.

[intrepidity]

17. It's the combination of the two drugs

One drug (retinoic acid) seems to increase the number of lysosomes in astrocytes, while the other drug enhances the ability of the astrocytes to degrade abeta.

It will be interesting to see how it goes. We're all so used to hearing about these early results that seem so promising, but never pan out. Eventually something will.

Astrocytes studied in cell cultures and in Alzheimer's mouse models were stimulated by retinoic acid to phagocytose—destroy Aβ—through the activation of the low-density lipoprotein cholesterol receptor and triggered to subsequently degrade Aβ in lysosomes by the cholesterol-lowering drug gemfibrozil.

.....

Their experiments revealed that the drug combination activated a receptor called PPARα, which encouraged astrocytes to destroy the mind-damaging amyloid, the cause of plaques. PPARα stands for peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-alpha. PPARα is a transcriptional factor that regulates the expression of genes involved in fatty acid oxidation and is also a major regulator of energy homeostasis. PPARα is critical in the elimination of amyloid beta, Aβ.

[TlalocW]

10. I was just waiting for the two drugs to be

Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.

It's been that kind of year.

TlalocW

[roamer65]

11. Two long standing FDA approved drugs.

It’s worth a shot.

[mjvpi]

12. I lost my mom to this. Hoping it's not following me. Don't want to put my kids through it.

What were the names of those drugs again?

[sop]

15. Interesting how many off-label uses for drugs are being discovered these days.

Off-label is the prescription of a drug for a condition other than that for which it has been officially approved.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

16. Hmmm. This drug also interests me because I have genetically low HDL

which is is notoriously difficult to raise. I can't tell from what I've read so far how much of one, but there is some evidence of a cancer risk from gemfibrosil.