LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — UAMS researchers are hopeful they’ve made a huge breakthrough in the fight against Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Their findings were recently published in the journal Aging Biology. The researched was conducted by a team consisting of UAMS postdoctoral fellow Akshatha Ganne and the pairing of Robert Reis and Srinivas Ayyadevara, who are both professors at the school.
Ganne said that the research didn’t involve coming up with a new drug, but rather using existing ones.
“We were looking up some of the drugs that are already FDA-approved,” Ganne said.
One of those drugs is ezetimibe, which was approved by the FDA in 2022 and is typically used to lower cholesterol. But, after examining a database of over 950,000 older adults, the team noticed it was also doing something else too.
"The 4,400 or so patients in the database who were taking ezetimibe just to lower their cholesterol had only one-eighth of the incidence of Alzheimer's and related dementias,” Prof. Reis said.
The group said that ezetimibe works by breaking up proteins that tend to clump together in Alzheimer’s patients.
And as its FDA-approved status shows — the drug is safe and already in use.
“The ezetimibe is benign, very safe, has less side effects, and it can be given as preventative,” Prof. Ayyadevara said.
Not only that, the researchers think it could be a huge improvement over any treatments currently available.
“They at best have a 25-30% efficacy,” Reid said of other drugs on the market. “That is, they reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by 25-30%. We're talking about an 86-87% reduction."
But, the work isn't done yet.
As previously mentioned, this study was done by analyzing a database of adults taking ezetimibe.
Now, the researchers hope to continue their testing with more specific experiments.
“We have applied for a grant where we can do clinical studies on the same drug,” Ganne said, “Where we treat the patients with ezetimibe and see how that goes for mild cognitive impairment.”
The researchers also said they’re particularly excited about testing the use of the drug in heart disease patients, as heart disease- along with mild cognitive impairment- is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
According to the CDC, as many as 6.7 million Americans were living with Alzheimer’s in 2023 and that number is projected to increase to 14 million by 2060.