An arthritis drug can slow the march of Alzheimer’s, a small study suggests.
People with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s taking Etanercept maintained their mental abilities over six months, while those on a placebo continued to decline, the research found.
Scientists are cautiously optimistic that the drug could be given to dementia patients in about five years, if further trials are successful.
Professor Clive Holmes of the University of Southampton, who led the study, said: “Our results are better than we expected. We have shown that using Etanercept in patients who have Alzheimer’s disease would be safe and has positive outcomes after six months. However this is a small study and should now be tested in a larger clinical trial.”
Etanercerpt blocks the production of a protein known as TNFα, which causes damaging inflammation of the joints in people with rheumatoid arthritis. Previous research has found that Alzheimer’s patients with high levels of TNFα decline faster than those without, leading to theories that it could interfere with memory.
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In a study of 41 patients, Professor Holmes found that the half given a weekly injection of the drug maintained their cognitive abilities better than the control group, he reported at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Denmark yesterday.
“A large number of anti-inflammatory approaches have been tried in patients with established Alzheimer’s, but with little evidence of efficacy. There are very few studies that have come out with everything moving in the right direction. We have shown that a targeted approach against TNFα offers protection against the development of the disease,” Professor Holmes said.
“Our study was small and lasted for six months so it needs to be developed further, however our projections suggest that the benefits would continue. This now needs to be tested.”
Doug Brown, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “There is increasing evidence that drugs for other conditions may double up as dementia treatments and this interesting early research confirms Etanercept has potential. Additional larger trials will be needed but, if successful, we could be seeing this drug in use as treatment for Alzheimer’s in as little as five years.
“There is a desperate unmet need for new drugs for dementia, but we know that getting treatments to market from scratch can cost billions and take decades. Repurposing existing drugs in use for other conditions could see new treatments for dementia available in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost, so it is an opportunity we can’t afford to waste.”
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Eric Karran, director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “This is a good example of research implicating a mechanism in the disease – in this case systemic inflammation – narrowing down a potential target and using a compound against that target to test a hypothesis. However, we know that clinical trials have a high failure rate and so we need to see Etanercept tested further in larger and longer trials in Alzheimer’s disease.”