Researchers at UVA Health are urging for clinical trials to explore whether certain HIV medications, known as nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), can help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
This call for action comes after a groundbreaking study led by Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati and his team, which revealed that people taking these HIV drugs were significantly less likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Their findings were published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
NRTIs are commonly used to stop the HIV virus from reproducing in the body. However, Dr. Ambati’s team previously discovered that these drugs also have another unexpected benefit: they block the activation of inflammasomes.
Inflammasomes are proteins involved in the body’s immune response, but they are also linked to the development of Alzheimer’s. Inspired by this discovery, the team set out to see if patients on NRTIs had a lower risk of developing the disease.
To do this, the researchers analyzed two massive health insurance databases: the U.S. Veterans Health Administration Database, which mainly includes men, and the MarketScan database, which represents a broader mix of the population.
They focused on people aged 50 and older who were taking NRTIs for HIV or hepatitis B, another condition treated with these drugs. Anyone who already had Alzheimer’s before starting the medication was excluded from the study.
The researchers identified more than 270,000 patients who fit these criteria and then tracked their health outcomes over time. Their findings were striking. In the Veterans Health Administration data, patients saw a 6% reduction in their risk of developing Alzheimer’s for every year they took NRTIs.
The MarketScan database showed an even greater reduction—13% per year. This means that the longer someone took the medication, the lower their risk of Alzheimer’s became.
Dr. Ambati, who serves as the founding director of UVA’s Center for Advanced Vision Science, pointed out that Alzheimer’s currently affects over 10 million people globally each year. He suggested that if NRTIs were widely used for prevention, they could potentially stop around 1 million new cases of Alzheimer’s annually.
Given the rapid rise in Alzheimer’s diagnoses—projected to grow from nearly 7 million Americans today to 13 million by 2050—finding a way to prevent even a fraction of these cases would be life-changing for millions of families and could drastically reduce the cost of care, which is expected to skyrocket from $360 billion to nearly $1 trillion per year.
Interestingly, the study found that this protective effect against Alzheimer’s was specific to NRTIs. Other types of HIV medications did not show the same results, suggesting there is something unique about NRTIs’ ability to block inflammasomes that may be key to preventing the disease.
But that’s not the only exciting development from Dr. Ambati’s team. They have also created a new drug called K9, which is designed to be a safer and more effective version of NRTIs. K9 also blocks inflammasomes and is currently being tested in clinical trials for other diseases.
The team plans to extend these trials to include Alzheimer’s disease as well, to see if K9 can deliver even better protection with fewer side effects.
The results of this study are encouraging, but more research is needed to confirm whether NRTIs—or the new K9 drug—can effectively prevent Alzheimer’s in a wider population. If clinical trials are successful, it could lead to a major breakthrough in how we prevent and manage this devastating disease.
Dr. Ambati and his team are hopeful that their findings will pave the way for a new preventive treatment that could dramatically reduce Alzheimer’s cases worldwide and ease the financial and emotional burden it places on families and healthcare systems.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, please read studies about the likely cause of Alzheimer’s disease, and new non-drug treatment that could help prevent Alzheimer’s.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about diet that may help prevent Alzheimer’s, and results showing some dementia cases could be prevented by changing these 12 things.
The research findings can be found in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
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