Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine claim to have identified carvedilol, the drug that is presently approved for treatment of hypertension. It seemingly reduces the degenerative effect of Alzheimer’s disease and enhances healthy memory functions. This was achieved without reducing blood pressure activity among mice that were genetically adapted to Alzheimer’s disease brain degeneration and memory impairment.
Carvedilol is a blood pressure lowering agent that has the ability to induce activities which considerably lower Alzheimer’s disease-type brain and memory degeneration. In another analysis researchers examined how mice imbibed new tasks and how they recollected data that was chemically stored in the brain. Researchers identified that carvedilol treatment had the ability to enhance memory function.
“These studies are certainly very exciting, and suggest for the first time that certain antihypertensive drugs already available to the public may independently influence memory functions while reducing degenerative pathological features of the Alzheimer’s disease brainâ€, reveals study author Giulio Maria Pasinetti, MD, PhD, Saunders Family Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center of Excellence for Novel Approaches to Neurotherapeutics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
She further quotes, “Ongoing clinical research is in progress to test the benefits of carvedilol, which may prove to be an effective agent in the treatment of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. We look forward to further studying this drug in the human populationâ€.
Researchers observed that one group of mice received carvedilol treatment while the other group did not. They further conducted behavioral and learning tests among each group of mice. They found that mice in the carvedilol group took notably less time to recollect tasks as compared to the other group.
These findings are published in two studies in the current issues of Neurobiology of Aging and the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.