Antidepressant and Cancer Drugs Could Be First to Halt Dementia
A common anti-depressant drug could be the first drug to halt dementia in its tracks.
Trazodone has been shown to stop brain cells dying in mice, which is a key symptom of the degenerative brain condition. The brain cell effect was seen in a trial of a second drug - dibenzoylmethane - which was being used to treat cancer. These findings were published in the journal Brain.
Dr Doug Brown, from Alzheimer's Society, hailed the two breakthroughs:
"We're excited by the potential of these findings. As one of the drugs is already available as a treatment for depression the time taken to get from the lab to the pharmacy could be dramatically reduced."
Trazodone could be "repurposed" from its licence for anti-depressants to consider its impact on other conditions. Professor Giovanna Mallucci, of the Medical Research Council and the University of Cambridge, said: trazodone was already considered safe to use from its existing application, so a clinical trial would simply test whether the effects on brain cells in mice with neurodegeneration would apply to people in the early stages of Alzheimer's and other dementias.
This has raised hopes that there could be treatment for dementia sufferers in just a couple of years.
The impact could be massive as a growing number of people are contracting degenerative brain disorders. Dr Rob Buckle, Chief Science Officer at the MRC, said:
"We currently have no way of treating these diseases so the prospect of finding drugs that can slow or stop them from progressing is extremely exciting - even more so when this is based on drugs that have already undergone expensive and time consuming testing in unrelated studies to establish that they are likely to be safe to use in humans."