Promising Animal Studies Using Commonly Available Drugs

Homewerk

 This interesting article showed up in my newsfeed today.  Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago  have found in animal studies that the combination of two common drugs help reduce amyloid beta in the brain.

Excerpt from the article:  “A promising series of early studies is highlighting two well known medicine cabinet standbys—gemfibrosil, an old-school cholesterol-lowering drug, and retinoic acid, a vitamin A derivative. Gemfibrosil, is sold as Lopid and while it's still used, it is not widely prescribed. Doctors now prefer to prescribe statins to lower cholesterol. Retinoic acid has been used in various formulations to treat everything from acne to psoriasis to cancer.”

I’m posting this as information, realizing that observed effects and outcomes in animal studies are not necessarily replicated in humans. Still, wouldn’t it be something if this research actually bore fruit?

 

Article URL:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-treatment-alzheimer-pharmacy-shelves-decades.html

Information about Rush University Medical Center is at 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_University_Medical_Center

All_In

Thank you for posting the link.

 Will be following this....

Crushed

Good discussion of the research by qualified peers at

https://www.alzforum.org/papers/activation-ppara-enhances-astroglial-uptake-and-degradation-v-amyloid

It is a hard slog but it gives confidence that it is good science

Jo C.

Despite my having to say, "Huh?  What?" while reading; there is some very interesting information here.  Remember when treating stomach ulcers was SO complicated and not very successful - then along came that lone physician who discovered that a simple antibiotic did indeed clear and "cure" many such ulcers completely, simply and with no obnoxious sequelae.  He was initially scoffed at by the establishment; however, this is now the medically accepted primary treatment.   Also, remember how penicillin was discovered?  Not all amazing discoveries are hugely expensive, large business funded trials with complex meds as the answer . . . .

Wouldn't it be amazing and wonderful if this turned out to be an effective treatment approach and so simple . . . . one can hope. It will be exciting to see where this goes and even if not absolute in results, it may well lead to new pathways for treatment.

I did glean the following from one of the articles:

"What could these findings mean for treatment? Other research groups have previously, and separately, tested gemfibrozil and the retinoic acid receptor agonist acitretin in pilot AD trials, to no avail (Dec 2019 conference news; Endres et al., 2014). "

“Preclinical experiments suggest retinoic acid might be useful to treat AD, but we still need larger clinical trials with cognitive measurements,” Kristina Endres, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, wrote to Alzforum. She noted that the current paper did not compare the effects of the drug combination to those of each individually. “One cannot judge the superiority of the combined drugs versus the already multifunctional effects of retinoic acid alone,” Endres added."

So; attention is being paid and it may well lead into something that could be wonderful and amazing in its simplicity.

J.