A drug, widely used to fight skin cancer, can start a “countdown” of Alzheimer’s disease in just a few hours.
We are talking about the medicine called bexarotene. Neuroscientists from the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have conducted experiments on mice, which resulted in the ability to identify what doctors called a “pathology of the disease” – its biological causes. They found that the quantity of amyloid protein during Alzheimer’s disease can be reduced by 25% within 6 hours due to the use of bexarotene, deposited in the brain in the form of plaques and, eventually, destroying it. 72 hours after giving the drug to the rodents, they remembered how to build a nest of tissue paper, though previously they had lost the skills of life because of the accumulation of amyloid. The experiment resulted in the disappearance of three-quarters of brain amyloid plaques in mice.
Following this success, the scientists are going to focus on experiments with people, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The humanity will have to wait a little before being able to call this discovery a real scientific breakthrough in the fight against one of the diseases of our time. After all, successful experiments with animals do not necessarily guarantee the same results in humans.
