Scientists from the University of Colorado found two commonly used psychiatric drugs show evidence of improving symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease including boosting cognition.
They found patients who received these drugs developed better cognition and actually improved in their clinical diagnosis.
Compared to those who did not take these drugs, they reverted from Alzheimer’s disease to mild cognitive impairment or from mild cognitive impairment to normal.
The research is published in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy and was conducted by Huntington Potter et al.
The drugs, the antidepressant imipramine and antipsychotic olanzapine, are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
And since depression and psychosis are common in those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), many patients take other medications for these problems, providing a large control population for the scientists to evaluate the effects.
In the study, the team was looking for drugs that block the effect of the apolipoprotein E4 protein or APOE4, which is encoded by a gene variant that when inherited, confers the strongest risk for developing late-onset Alzheimer’s.
The researchers screened 595 compounds in a drug library from the National Institutes of Health and identified several compounds that specifically blocked the effect of APOE4 on Alzheimer’s amyloid formation.
They found that psychiatric patients with AD using imipramine and olanzapine showed significant improvement in AD symptoms.
The only thing these drugs have in common is that they block the catalytic effect of APOE4 on the formation of amyloids in the brain.
The team found patients taking imipramine or olanzapine had improved cognition and diagnoses, which are direct clinical measures of disease severity.
The next step would be to test imipramine, which has fewer side effects than olanzapine, on a rodent model and if successful conduct a clinical trial.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, please read studies about the root cause of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s, and 5 steps to protect against Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies that herb rosemary could help fight COVID-19, Alzheimer’s disease, and results showing this stuff in mouth may help prevent Alzheimer’s.
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