Alzheimer's Disease by Judes Poirier

Author:Judes Poirier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2014-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

This brings us to the intriguing story of the role of anti-inflammatory medication in Alzheimer’s disease. The first solid scientific evidence indicating that using anti-inflammatory drugs might be beneficial in Alzheimer’s disease came from a group of researchers at Duke University in North Carolina (Breitner et al., 1994). During the 1990s, they managed to bring together a large group of sets of twins. The fundamental question being asked by the American researchers was the following: “What explains the fact that two identical twins, male or female (monozygotic), with exactly the same genetic heritage, begin to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease five, ten, and even fifteen years apart?”

The only way to answer this question satisfactorily was to compare lifestyles and habits in identical twins. After having asked participants dozens and even hundreds of very personal questions, the researchers clearly saw that the twins who did not get Alzheimer’s, or who got the disease much later, almost all had arthritis! The researchers’ first reflex was therefore to ask: “Does arthritis have an as yet unknown protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease?” More likely, could the drugs commonly used to manage arthritis pain have an indirect beneficial effect on the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (and on the risk of getting it)? Now, after ten years of research, it is quite clear that non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs appear to have a measurable protective effect on people at risk before they show symptoms, whereas they have no beneficial effect in people who already have the disease.

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