Hayfever Drug Shows Promise for Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease
Posted by admin in News, tags: alzheimer's, clinical trials, dimebon, small molecule
A study published in the July 18th issue of The Lancet shows that a drug once used in Russia to treat hayfever has the potential to improve symptoms in dementia patients. The study of 183 patients, tested dimebon (dimebolin) vs placebo in patients with untreated mild-to-moderate dementia. Patients taking dimebon improved over a six month period whilst those taking placebo got worse.
A smaller group of patients who continued taking dimebon for a further six months showed continuing improvement over this period. This ongoing improvement is seen as particularly important since none of the approved drugs for Alzheimer’s Disease has shown increasing improvement over twelve months. Although this was a relatively small study, the initial results are very encouraging and warrant further investigation.
In a separate study, also reported in The Lancet, immunisation against the amyloid-beta peptide was shown to clear amyloid plaques from the brain, but not to prevent the progressive neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
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[...] have previously reported on the potential for Dimebon in Alzheimer’s disease (July 2008, July 2009), where the ability of the drug to stabilise and/or enhance mitochondrial function is [...]