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Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found that the diabetic drug, pramlintide, reduces amyloid-beta peptides, a major component of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the brain and improves learning and memory in two experimental AD models. These findings, which appear online in Molecular Psychiatry, also found AD patients have a lower level of amylin in blood compared to those without this disease. These results may provide a new avenue for both treatment and diagnosis of AD.
AD is a degenerative brain disease associated with severe functional decline and has no effective treatment. Currently there are 5 million people with Alzheimer's disease in the U.S. alone, and the cost of caring for these patients exceeds $100 billion per year. If no effective treatments are developed, the number of Alzheimer's patients is expected to grow to 14-16 million by the year 2050.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-03-diabetes-drug-alzheimer-disease-experimental.html
AD is a degenerative brain disease associated with severe functional decline and has no effective treatment. Currently there are 5 million people with Alzheimer's disease in the U.S. alone, and the cost of caring for these patients exceeds $100 billion per year. If no effective treatments are developed, the number of Alzheimer's patients is expected to grow to 14-16 million by the year 2050.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-03-diabetes-drug-alzheimer-disease-experimental.html