Researchers at the National Cardiovascular Research Center (CNIC) in collaboration with a team from the Rockefeller University of New York (USA) showed that treatment with dabigatran, a direct-acting oral anticoagulant, delays the appearance of Alzheimer’s disease in mice. The finding is an important advance to transfer the results to clinical practice and thus achieve an effective therapy for the pathology.
The results, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), show that the animal models did not experience memory loss or decrease in cerebral circulation after one year of treatment with dabigatran.
Similarly, the scientists observed that this therapy reduced brain inflammation, vascular damage and reduced amyloid peptide deposits, typical signs of Alzheimer’s.
In recent years it has been discovered that this type of dementia, which affects more than 30 million people in the world, is associated with a decrease in cerebral circulation, so that the brain cells do not receive all the nutrients and oxygen necessary and die.
It is also known that Alzheimer’s is a multifactorial disorder with a chronic prothrombotic component. The present study has combined physiological and molecular techniques to demonstrate that long-term anticoagulation with this medication improves pathogenesis in a transgenic mouse model.
Dabigatran, thanks to its high efficacy and fewer side effects than other classic anticoagulants, is approved for use in different human diseases. According to Marta Cortés Canteli, researcher Miguel Servet of the CNIC and responsible for the study, said that “this discovery is an important step forward to transfer our results to clinical practice and thus achieve an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.”
As Cortés Canteli states, “winning the battle involves getting combined and individualized therapies aimed at treating the different mechanisms that contribute to this pathology. One of them is to improve cerebral circulation and now we know that the use of oral anticoagulant treatments could be effective in those patients with Alzheimer’s disease with a pro-coagulant tendency”.
Awaiting future clinical trials
Due to the progressive aging of the population, it is estimated that the number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease will triple in 2050. In fact, every three seconds there is a new case in the world and, the treatments approved to date only help temporarily with memory problems, but fail to stop or reverse symptoms.
“Neurodegenerative diseases are deeply linked to the pathology of cerebral vessels. The study of the brain-heart nexus in neurodegenerative diseases is the challenge of the next decade,” said Valentín Fuster, one of the main authors of the work and general director of the CNIC.
Before clinical trials occur, the researchers believe that this study suggests that dabigatran could be a possible future treatment to normalize cerebral circulation in Alzheimer’s patients.
“To carry out this individualized therapy, a diagnostic tool will be necessary to identify those patients with a tendency to coagulate. That is one of the lines of research that we will focus on in the coming years,” says Cortés Canteli.
This study began in the United States 6 years ago with US funding, and was completed in Spain thanks to various national and European grants that allowed Marta Cortés Canteli to move her research to Spain in 2015.
Source: SINC
