A team of American scientists from the Cleveland Clinic examined the medical data of 7 million 70-year-old Americans with a six-year follow-up . The results showed that adults who took sildenafil , the main ingredient in the little blue pill known as Viagra, were 69% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s compared to people who did not use this drug.
“This is one of many efforts we are supporting to find existing drugs or safe compounds available for other conditions that would be good candidates for Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials,” the authors clarify.
Clinical trials are needed to confirm whether the erectile dysfunction drug can actually prevent the disease , explains Feixiong Cheng, a project leader whose study is published in the journal Nature Aging .
The accumulation of beta amyloid and tau proteins in the brain leads to amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tau tangles, two hallmarks of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes. The amount and location of these proteins in the brain can help define endophenotypes. However, there are currently no FDA-approved anti-amyloid or anti-tau small molecule Alzheimer’s treatments, and many clinical trials for such treatments have failed in the last decade.
“Recent studies show that the interaction between amyloid and tau contributes more to Alzheimer’s than either of them alone,” Cheng said. “Therefore, we hypothesized that drugs that target the intersection of the molecular network of amyloid and tau endophenotypes should have the greatest potential for success.”
The study is observational, so it is not clear that sildenafil intake is behind the reduction in the risk of Alzheimer’s or that other factors are responsible.
Referencia: “Endophenotype-based in silico network medicine discovery combined with insurance record data mining identifies sildenafil as a candidate drug for Alzheimer’s disease” 6 December 2021, Nature Aging.
DOI: 10.1038/s43587-021-00138-z
