A new study suggests that some everyday medications—like antibiotics, antivirals, vaccines, and anti-inflammatory drugs—may help lower the risk of developing dementia.
Researchers looked at the health records of more than 130 million people to find existing drugs that could be reused to treat or prevent dementia.
Dementia is one of the top causes of death in the UK and affects millions of people around the world. It causes memory loss, confusion, and other problems that make daily life very difficult. It also places a huge emotional and financial burden on families, with global costs over $1 trillion each year.
Despite years of research, it’s still very hard to find treatments that truly work. Most current medicines only help with symptoms and don’t stop the disease from getting worse.
Some new drugs, like lecanemab and donanemab, have shown they can reduce amyloid plaques in the brain—a key sign of Alzheimer’s disease. But these drugs have not been approved for everyday use yet because their benefits are still too small.
Now, scientists are trying a different idea: instead of making new drugs from scratch, they are looking at drugs already approved for other health problems to see if they might also help with dementia. This is called drug repurposing. It could save a lot of time and money because these drugs are already known to be safe.
A research team from the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter reviewed 14 studies that looked at more than 130 million people and over 1 million dementia cases. They found that some types of medicine were linked to a lower risk of dementia.
To their surprise, they found that people who had taken antibiotics, antivirals, or vaccines were less likely to get dementia. This supports the idea that infections—like bacteria or viruses—might be one of the causes of dementia. One example is the BCG vaccine, used to prevent tuberculosis, which may help lower the risk of dementia.
The researchers also found that anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen, were linked to a lower risk. This fits with other studies showing that inflammation in the body might play a big role in causing dementia. Some genes that raise the risk for dementia are also connected to inflammation, which adds more support to this idea.
However, not all the results were clear. Some blood pressure drugs, antidepressants, and diabetes medications were linked to both higher and lower risks of dementia depending on the study. This may be because different drugs work in different ways, or because of how the studies were done.
Dr. Ilianna Lourida, one of the main researchers, said that just because a drug seems linked to a change in dementia risk doesn’t mean it’s the cause. For example, people with diabetes already have a higher chance of dementia, so it might look like diabetes drugs increase the risk when they really don’t.
She also said it’s very important that patients don’t make any changes to their medications without talking to their doctor first.
To help move research forward faster, the UK government is supporting a project to test drugs that could be repurposed to treat dementia.
Dr. Ben Underwood, another researcher on the team, said that by using large health databases, scientists can find out which drugs should be tested first in future studies.
This research gives hope that existing medicines could become new ways to fight dementia. Although more studies are needed to be sure, repurposing drugs could help bring effective treatments to patients more quickly and at lower costs.
If you care about dementia, please read studies that eating apples and tea could keep dementia at bay, and Olive oil: a daily dose for better brain health.
For more health information, please see recent studies what you eat together may affect your dementia risk, and time-restricted eating: a simple way to fight aging and cancer.
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