Posted on 06/29/2022 9:20:51 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
Two commonly used psychiatric drugs show evidence of improving symptoms of Alzheimer's disease including boosting cognition.
"The people who received these drugs developed better cognition and actually improved in their clinical diagnosis," said Huntington Potter, Ph.D. "Compared to those who did not take these drugs, they reverted from Alzheimer's disease to mild cognitive impairment or from mild cognitive impairment to normal."
The drugs, the antidepressant imipramine and antipsychotic olanzapine, are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And since depression and psychosis are common in those with Alzheimer's disease (AD), many patients take other medications for these problems, providing a large control population for the scientists to evaluate the effects.
The researchers screened 595 compounds in a drug library from the National Institutes of Health and identified several compounds that specifically blocked the effect of APOE4 on Alzheimer amyloid formation.
"The only things these drugs have in common is that they block the catalytic effect of APOE4 on the formation of amyloids in the brain," Potter said, referring to the proteins that form clumps and disrupt cell function in AD.
The results were surprising.
"Our analyses show that, compared to the control populations, subjects taking imipramine or olanzapine had improved cognition and diagnoses, which are direct clinical measures of disease severity," the study said. "Notably, in our drug screen, we found that imipramine and olanzapine strongly inhibited the apoE4-catalyzed fibrillization of Aβ (amyloid beta), whereas none of the other antidepressants or antipsychotics whose use was reported in the NACC database had any such activity and none showed any benefit for AD patients."
"The number of human drugs that have shown any benefit to AD patients are maybe one or two or three," Potter said. "So this is a very promising advance."
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Imipramine is around $30 a prescription and olanzapine is around $100, on Goodrx.
If this proves out, it will be a Godsend for so many people. This is a devastating condition for individuals and their families.
Goodrx is showing olanzapine from $5.99 at Costco through $118 at Kroger.
I didn’t look down far enough.
So, one could simply seek to shift a current medicine need to, perhaps ideally, imipramine, and look for positive changes.
But has it been approved for this yet?
Interestingly, imipramine is an anticholinergic and its use has been implicated in the development of dementia at a later age, as have first-generation antihistamines. I would advise caution until they at least do RCT human studies.
Off label use should be available to doctors.
Besides, if either class of drugs is currently being used, but isn’t one of these two, any doctor can switch them.
It’s a win-win.
As the writeup describes in a part I did not bring in, it is already being used by a number of Alzheimer’s patients, which is partly how they identified its benefit.
I’m not saying it doesn’t have the benefit in AZ patients, just that its use might have radically different outcomes depending on age and context of use. I took it myself but only for a very short time decades ago.
That is a fair point.
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