UVA health scientists call for clinical studies that test the potential of HIV drugs called NRTIs to prevent Alzheimer’s disease after they have discovered that patients using the drugs are considerably less likely to develop the memory-shaved state.
The researchers, led by Uva’s Jayakrishna Ambati, MD, previously identified a possible mechanism with which the drugs Alzheimer’s could prevent. This promising finding led them to analyze two of the country’s largest health insurance databases to evaluate the risk of Alzheimer’s in patients prescribed the medicines. In one, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, the patients used the drugs every year. In the other, the annual decrease was 13%.
“It is estimated that more than 10 million people around the world develop Alzheimer’s disease every year,” says Ambati, founder of UvA’s Center for Advanced Vision Science and the Dupont Guerrry III Professor at the Ophtalmology University of Virginia School of Medicine. “Our results suggest that taking these drugs can prevent around 1 million new cases of Alzheimer’s disease every year.”
Preventing Alzheimer’s
NRTIs, or nucleoside reverse transcriptaser inhibitors, are used to prevent the HIV virus from replicating in the body. But Ambati and his team have previously established that the medicines can also prevent the activation of inflammation, important means of our immune system. These proteins are involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, so Ambati and his colleagues wanted to see or patients who used the inflammasom -blocking drugs were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s.
To do that, they assessed 24 years of patient data in the US Veterans Health Administration Database – which consists heavily of men – and 14 years of data in the MarketScan database of commercially insured patients, who offers a broader representation of the population. They searched for patients who were at least 50 years old and used medicines for HIV or Hepatitis B, treated another disease with NRTIs. They have excluded patients with an earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
In total, the researchers identified more than 270,000 patients who met the study criteria and then analyzed how much Alzheimer’s went. Even after correction for factors that could cloud the results, such as whether patients had existing medical disorders, the researchers determined that the reduction in the risk of Alzheimer’s in patients on NRTIs was “significant and substantial”, they report in a new scientific paper.
The researchers note that patients who use other types of HIV drugs did not show the same reduction in the risk of Alzheimer’s as on NRTIS. Based on that, they say that NRTI’s clinical tests justify to determine their assets to ward off Alzheimer’s.
If it is successful, the benefits can be huge, because the rates of Alzheimer’s climb dramatically. Almost 7 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s today, but that number is expected to increase to 13 million by 2050. Furthermore, the estimated annual healthcare costs for Alzheimer’s and other dementias can rise from $ 360 billion to almost $ 1 trillion, reports the Alzheimer’s Association.
“We have also developed a new Inflammasome-blocking medicine called K9, a safer and more effective version of NRTIS,” said Ambati. “This medicine is already in clinical examinations for other diseases and we are also planning to test K9 in Alzheimer’s disease.”
Findings published
The researchers have published their findings in Alzheimer & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. The research team consisted of Joseph Magagnoli, Meenakshi Ambati, Tammy Cummings, Joseph Nguyen, Claire C. Thomas, Vidya L. Ambati, S. Scott Sutton, Bradley D. Gelfand and Jayakrishna Ambati. Jayakrishna Ambati is the co-founder of IVEENA Holdings, IVEA liver systems and Inflammasome Therapeutic; A complete list of the authors’ disclosure is included in the newspaper.
The research was supported by the UvA Strategic Investment Fund, Grant 167; The National Institutes of Health, Grants R01EY028027, R01EY029799, R01EY031039, R01AG078892, R01AG082108, R01EY028027, R01EY039, R01AG07892, R01AG07892 R01EY032512 and R01DA054992; The Dupont Guerrry III professorship; and Mr. and Mrs. Eli W. Tullis.