According to a new research, people with Alzheimer’s disease who were treated with diabetes drugs showed considerably fewer markers of the disease including abnormal microvasculature and deregulated gene expressions in their brains, compared to patients who were treated using other kinds of drugs.The study was performed by the researchers of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, results of which were published in the journal of ‘PLOS One’.This is the first study to examine what happens in the pathways of brain tissues and endothelial cells, the cells lining blood vessels in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients treated with diabetes medication. The results of the study will help future Alzheimer’s disease studies and potential new therapies targeting specific cells since they suggest that targeting the brain’s capillary system could have beneficial effects in Alzheimer’s patients.Many elderly people with diabetes have brain changes that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s. Despite this linkage, two previous Mount Sinai studies on brain tissue found that the brains of people with both Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes had fewer Alzheimer’s lesions than the brains from people with Alzheimer’s disease without diabetes.The results suggested that anti-diabetes medications had a protective effect on the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients.To determine what happens at the molecular level, the research team developed a method to separate brain capillaries from the brain tissue of 34 people with Alzheimer’s and type 2 diabetes who had been treated with anti-diabetes drugs and compare them to tissue from 30 brains of people with Alzheimer’s without diabetes and 19 brains of people without Alzheimer’s or diabetes.
