The well-known drug that reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by 70 percent

Researchers have analyzed medical information from insurance claims and found to their surprise a link between taking Viagra and a 70% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Their research technique may also benefit Parkinson's and ALS patients

Walla!

health

12/12/2021

Sunday, 12 December 2021, 06:57 Updated: 06:58

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Alzheimer's can start even decades before the onset of symptoms (one-minute monitoring system)

Alzheimer's is one of the most well-known and unfortunate diseases of old age, and in light of the aging population trend around the world and the increase in life expectancy is also one of the most burning issues on the table of researchers, doctors and public health policy makers.

Many studies are trying to find her medications, treatments, contraceptives and even a vaccine against it.

A new and extensive study whose results are being published these days offers another direction - the use of existing drugs that can reduce the risk of developing the disease.

Or rather, one specific drug, which sells to us from a completely different field - Viagra.

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In a study published in the journal Nature Aging, the researchers analyzed medical information collected as part of health insurance claims from more than seven million people in the US. Their analysis revealed that plaintiffs who took sildenafil - the generic name of the blue pill we all know as Viagra - had a 70 percent lower chance of developing Alzheimer's than plaintiffs who did not take the drug.

70% reduction in the risk of developing Alzheimer's within 6 years of taking the drug.

Viagra (Photo: ShutterStock)

Viagra belongs to a family of drugs called phosphodiesterase inhibitors, whose action dilates blood vessels and relaxes muscles in the heart around it and around the lungs and genitals.

Common contraindications to the use of Viagra are to treat men's sexual dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension, although there have been studies in the past that have raised potential for the use of phosphodiesterase inhibitors in the treatment of dementia.

Hundreds of thousands of protein interactions, and only one is important

At the beginning of their work, the researchers mapped the biological signs of Alzheimer's disease and identified 13 physiological-genetic mechanisms (also called endophenotypes), which are related to it. In total, those 13 endophenotypes were found to depend on hundreds of thousands of interactions with different proteins in the body (351,444 interactions with proteins, if you want to be very specific). However, the most significant interactions were with amyloid and tau proteins. And if these two names ring familiar to you, it's because these are the two proteins that accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and are considered to be significant causative agents of the disease.

"Recent studies show that the interaction between tau and amyloid proteins is more significant for the development of Alzheimer's than the effect of each of them individually," explained Dr. Feishung Cheng, who led the current study. Will have the greatest success. "

Amyloid beta accumulation in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient (Photo: ShutterStock)

To this end, the researchers examined the effect of more than 1,600 FDA-approved drugs on Alzheimer's-associated proteins, and thus found that Viagra (or Sildenafil) is the drug that most significantly disrupts the interaction between tau and amyloid proteins.

With this conclusion in hand, they turned to analyzing the insurance claims data of 7.2 million Americans and found that those who took Viagra had a 69 percent lower risk of getting a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s compared to those who did not take the drug, within 6 years of taking it.

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Quite predictably, most of the plaintiffs whose data were included in the study and took Viagra were men, however the researchers argue that their findings are valid even after adjustments and weightings of gender, age and race.

In the last phase of their study, the researchers used stem cells taken from an Alzheimer's patient to try to produce neurons in a petri dish under laboratory conditions, and saw that adding the drug to the dish led to an increase in neuronal growth and inhibited the accumulation of tau proteins. This finding points to a mechanism that could produce pharmacological protection against Alzheimer's disease. However, researchers insist that at this stage their research cannot establish a cause-and-effect relationship and that further studies are needed to confirm Viagra's effectiveness in treating Alzheimer's.

"Since our study only demonstrates a link between the drug sildenafil and a decrease in the incidence of Alzheimer's disease, our next step is to design a mechanical and randomized clinical trial that could examine a causal relationship and confirm the benefits that Viagra drug therapy may have," he said. He also added that he believes the research approach he and his colleagues have taken in this study may also be relevant to other degenerative diseases of the brain such as Parkinson's and ALS and may promote processes of discovering beneficial drugs that also exist for such diseases.

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• Alzheimer's

• dementia

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