NSAID Therapy May Improve Cognitive Function In Alzheimer's Patients
 

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WESTPORT (Reuters Health) - The use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs) may enhance cognitive performance in patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to the results of two independent studies.

Dr. Glenda M. Halliday from the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, Randwick, Australia, and a multicenter team collected postmortem brain tissue samples from 44 patients with Alzheimer's disease who had participated in a 5-year case-control study.

The group selected samples from 12 patients, 5 of whom had taken NSAIDs "for a considerable time before death." They compared these samples and the patients' medical records with those from 10 nondemented controls, of whom 3 had taken anti-inflammatory drugs.

"Of the patients with Alzheimer's disease, anti-inflammatory drug users performed better on neuropsychological test scores than did nonusers," Dr. Halliday's team reports in the June issue of the Archives of Neurology. However, "there were no significant differences in the amount of inflammatory glia, plaques, or tangles in either diagnostic group," the team found. "If anything there were more inflammatory microglia and more neuropathological changes in the Alzheimer's cases who used NSAIDs."

Thus, the data "give no indication that the age-related Alzheimer's disease neuropathological changes can be stopped" by treatment with NSAIDs, the investigators conclude.

Separately, in a population-based study, Dr. James C. Anthony from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, and other members of the Cache County Memory Study Group found that compared current use of NSAIDs, aspirin, H2 receptor antagonists and three control drugs in 201 Alzheimer's disease
patients and 4,425 nondemented controls.

"The analyses showed an inverse association between the use of each target medicine class and the odds of Alzheimer's disease," the researchers report in the June 13th issue of Neurology, "whereas little or no such association was observed with other medicines used for similar indications."

"The findings with aspirin are interesting because 65% of subjects who used this drug stated they did so for cardiovascular prophylaxis (hence, presumably, in low dosage)," Dr. Anthony's group notes. "A significant
inverse association with Alzheimer's disease thus appeared with sustained doses of aspirin that would not be thought of as anti-inflammatory in any conventional sense."

Arch Neurol 2000;57:831-836. Neurology 2000;54:2066-2071

 


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