Drug Agent Arrests Alzheimer Disease
Four million Americans suffer from Alzheimer disease, and while
some drugs minimize or stabilize symptoms, they cannot alter the
progressive loss of brain cells. However, a medication used to treat
the symptoms of mild to moderate Alzheimer disease may actually
slow its progression, according to an IUSM study.
The study, which appears in a recent issue of Archives of Neurology,
enabled researchers to evaluate a change in cognition observed in
patients who prematurely discontinued treatment with either a placebo
or Exelon® (rivastigmine tartrate), a widely prescribed medication.
“If Exelon had an effect only on the symptoms of the disease,
we would have expected rapid deterioration in cognition, to the
level observed in the placebo group, when patients were withdrawn
from the medication. But that was not the case with this study,”
notes Martin Farlow, MD, professor of medicine at the IU School
of Medicine and director of the Alzheimer Disease Program and Clinic
at Indiana University Hospital.
“Instead, we found that patients who received Exelon before
withdrawing from the study showed significantly less cognitive decline
than placebo-treated patients, suggesting a possible effect in delaying
the biological progression of Alzheimer,” says Dr. Farlow,
who is principal investigator and lead author of the study.
Additionally, the patients who had used the medication showed less
cognitive decline than patients in the placebo group even twenty-six
weeks after discontinuing treatment.
Exelon is a cholinesterase inhibitor, a laboratory-produced agent
designed to enhance memory and other cognitive functions by influencing
certain chemical activities in the brain, in particular, cells’
ability to send and receive messages. In the Alzheimer-afflicted
brain, cells releasing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine are damaged
or destroyed, resulting in lower levels of this important chemical
messenger.
“Cholinesterase inhibition is the most extensively researched
and best therapeutic approach for the symptomatic treatment of Alzheimer
disease, providing clinical benefits presumably through an increase
of acetylcholine levels and enhancing neurotransmission,”
Dr. Farlow says.
Exelon, manufactured by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., was approved
for consumer use by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000.
Delaying Dementia
Martin Farlow, director of the IU Alzheimer Disease Program
and Clinic, says patients treated with Exelon showed significantly
less cognitive decline compared to placebo-treated patients even
after withdrawing from the drug.
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