Science Daily has (rather densely written) research showing how specific drugs could not only stop dementia but reverse its effects:
A lack of knowledge about cellular pathways critical to the development of dementia… has stood in the way of significant clinical advance. But now, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) are breaking through that barrier. They show, for the first time in an animal model, that tau pathology — the second-most important lesion in the brain in patients with Alzheimer’s disease — can be reversed by a drug.
“We show that we can intervene after disease is established and pharmacologically rescue mice that have tau-induced memory deficits,” explained senior investigator Domenico Praticò, MD, Scott Richards North Star Foundation Chair for Alzheimer’s Research, Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Microbiology, and Director of the Alzheimer’s Center at Temple at LKSOM. The study, published online in the journal Molecular Neurobiology, raises new hope for human patients affected by dementia.
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In experiments in animals, they found that the leukotriene pathway plays an especially important role in the later stages of disease.
“At the onset of dementia, leukotrienes attempt to protect nerve cells, but over the long term, they cause damage,” Dr. Praticò said. “Having discovered this, we wanted to know whether blocking leukotrienes could reverse the damage, whether we could do something to fix memory and learning impairments in mice having already abundant tau pathology.”
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When the animals were 12 months old, the equivalent of age 60 in humans, they were treated with zileuton, a drug that inhibits leukotriene formation by blocking the 5-lipoxygenase enzyme.
After 16 weeks of treatment, animals were administered maze tests to assess their working memory and their spatial learning memory. Compared with untreated animals, tau mice that had received zileuton performed significantly better on the tests. Their superior performance suggested a successful reversal of memory deficiency.
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“Inflammation was completely gone from tau mice treated with the drug,” Dr. Praticò said. “The therapy shut down inflammatory processes in the brain, allowing the tau damage to be reversed.”
The study is especially exciting because zileuton is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of asthma.