It鈥檚 been a strange week for Alzheimer鈥檚 patients, with both good and bad news from two different studies.
An abandoned drug rescued from the scrapheap has provided the best results yet of any drug against the disease, and is also the first to continue improving symptoms of patients the longer they take it.
Developed as an antihistamine in Russia and newly tested for a year on 120 Alzheimer鈥檚 patients, the drug Dimebon raised standard scores of practical cognitive abilities to almost 7 points above those receiving placebo, a relatively large difference on a 70-point scale.
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The study, published in The Lancet, was led by of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Yet the same edition also includes some bad news from a trial in which Alzheimer鈥檚 patients received a vaccine to prime destruction of protein plaques thought to cause the symptoms, such as memory loss and mental deterioration.
Led by of the University of Southampton, UK, the treatment successfully cleared plaque, as demonstrated by post mortems on dead patients, but failed to alleviate or reverse any symptoms.
鈥淥ur study is showing that removing plaques in people with preexisting disease won鈥檛 do any good,鈥� says Holmes. 鈥淭he plaques probably initiate the whole cascade of events that cause disease, so removing preexisting plaque is too late.鈥�
Holmes speculates that preventing formation of plaque in the first place might still be a way of forestalling Alzheimer鈥檚 symptoms, but once the plaques are formed and the disease is established, it might be worth focusing instead on damping down brain inflammation.
Journal references: The Lancet (vol 372, and )
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