Diabetes drugs could help Alzheimers

Tue, 29 Jul 2008
Recent reports from scientist at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine indicate that diabetes drugs could have a significant impact on Alzheimer’s disease . The study builds on previous reports that people with diabetes face a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease .

The results were presented on Monday at the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Chicago. Researcher Michal Beeri and team researched samples from almost 250 patients from the Mt. Sinai Brain Bank.

Beeri was reported as commenting: "The group on combination therapy had a very, very low load of neuritic plaques. Their brains looked almost like normal people. The medications did not, however, do much to reduce the number of tangles — the fibrous nerve nets that are another defining characteristic of the memory-robbing disease — in the brains of Alzheimer's patients."

She reportedly continued: "Our hypothesis is that with the combination therapy, the gene and protein expression of these Alzheimer's patients might be close to that of normal people who don't have Alzheimer's at all. I am hoping that this sheds light on a potentially new mechanism for insulin's role in controlling the disease and lead us to new therapies."

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