NEWSWEEK – Existing cancer drugs have shown promise as a future treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, new research has found.
The drugs work by restoring healthy sugar metabolism in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and may offer effective treatment across a range of different neurodegenerative disorders.
Alzheimer’s disease affects roughly 5.8 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The progressive disease is the most common form of dementia and is associated with memory loss and cognitive decline in regions of the brain involved in thought, memory and language.
Today, there is no known cure for Alzheimer’s, although scientists believe that it is caused by the abnormal buildup of proteins in and around brain cells.
However, alongside this protein buildup, Alzheimer’s patients also see sustained declines in their brain’s ability to break down the sugar glucose.
“Glucose metabolism declines significantly in Alzheimer’s disease,” the study’s senior author, Katrin Andreasson, a neurologist at the Stanford School of Medicine and member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, told Newsweek. “In fact, we sometimes use this measure to diagnose patients with Alzheimer’s.”
Without effective sugar metabolism, the brain does not have enough energy to fuel itself, resulting in impaired thinking and memory—two major hallmarks of Alzheimer’s.
In particular, higher levels of an enzyme called indoleamine-2,3,-dioxygenase 1 (IDO1) have been reported in the brains of patients with multiple neurodegenerative disorders, which researchers believe may be a direct consequence of the abnormal protein clumps that buildup in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.
IDO1 is a molecular machine that is thought to play an important role in regulating our immune systems, but it can also disrupt glucose metabolism in out cells.
In a new study, published in the journal Science, Andreasson and colleagues demonstrated that inhibiting IDO1, and the subsequent production of kynurenine, was able to improve cognitive function in lab mice with Alzheimer’s-like brain conditions by restoring healthy glucose metabolism in their brain cells …
