According to US researchers, the active ingredient Sildenafil in Viagra reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Does the use of erectile pills promote the ability to think and remember?

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is attributed to 60 percent of the approximately 25 million dementia cases worldwide. So far, the disease has been considered incurable and difficult to treat. Now a team of scientists from the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute under the direction of Feixiong Cheng has come across an important finding in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

They published the preliminary results of an encouraging study in the journal Nature Aging. According to this, there is a connection between taking sildefanil and the occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease. Sildefanil is the active ingredient in the erection pill Viagra, which was originally developed as a heart medication because it increases blood flow. Sildefanil is also used for other diseases such as pulmonary hypertension.

Cheng and his team wanted to find out whether FDA-approved drugs could also be used in Alzheimer’s patients. The reallocation of medical active ingredients for other forms of therapy is cheaper and much less complicated than the research and approval of new active ingredients. As part of the study, data from more than seven million patients and more than 1,600 approved drugs were evaluated.

The result: 69 percent fewer cases of Alzheimer’s were identified in patients who regularly take sildefanil than in patients who do not take it. In preclinical models, the research team found that sildefanil stimulates the growth of brain cells and addresses amyloids and tau proteins, which play a crucial role in Alzheimer’s disease. Cognition and memory could be significantly improved with the use of sildefanil, Cheng said. So far, however, it has only been proven that the intake of the active ingredient correlates with the lower incidence of the disease. Clinical studies should now prove the causality and show whether and how sildefanil can also be used in Alzheimer’s therapy.

International experts welcome the study, but warn against too much euphoria. The BBC quotes British neuroscientist Tara Spiers-Jones from the University of Edinburgh as saying: “Even if the data are scientifically interesting, I would not rush to take sildefanil for Alzheimer’s disease based on this study.”

Susan Kohlhaas, director of the British Alzheimer’s Research Center, told the Guardian: “This study does not prove that sildefanil is responsible for a lower risk of dementia or that it can slow down or stop the disease. The only way to find out is through a large-scale clinical trial.

Will Viagra be a potent force in the fight against Alzheimer’s ?

Viagra may be able to protect people from developing Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.

The medication, also known by its chemical name sildenafil, is safe to use and is currently prescribed as a treatment for erectile dysfunction in men as well as for high blood pressure.

However, a team of academics from the United States believes the drug may also be able to reduce the risk of a person developing Alzheimer’s by 69 per cent.

Academics looked at which approved pharmaceuticals might be effective at treating other conditions they are not currently intended for. More than 1600 drugs were studied and researchers looked at how they interacted with more than 350,000 different proteins in the human body.

This method is a new field of investigation and could lead to medicines being repurposed to expand their range of applications. Analysis revealed that sildenafil may be effective at targeting some proteins involved in the development of Alzheimer’s in the brain.

In 2020, 11.5 per cent of all registered deaths in England and Wales were attributed to Alzheimer’s or dementia, with only Covid accounting for a higher proportion of deaths.

How Did They Find Out? By Trawling through insurance records

Previous studies on animals have indicated that Alzheimer’s may be preventable and treatable with Viagra, but there has been no firm evidence from human trials.

The academics trawled through the medical insurance records of more than 7 million people in the US. This anonymised dataset allowed the researchers to look at those who were prescribed the drug and their health outcomes over several years.

It showed that about 99 per cent of people taking Viagra did not develop Alzheimer’s over the six-year span. For those not on the drug, the figure was about 95 per cent.

“After six years of follow-up, sildenafil usage was significantly associated with a 69 per cent reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease, compared with matched non-sildenafil users,” the scientists wrote in their paper, published in the journal Nature Aging.

Nearly all people, 98 per cent, in the study who were taking Viagra were male as a consequence of the drug’s current use. The researchers failed to find hard evidence that the drug lowered the risk of Alzheimer’s in women.

The study has demonstrated a link between those who take the drug and a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, but the data is unable to prove Viagra is the reason for this.

Experts caution that the only way to ascertain a demonstrable causation is with a clinical trial.

naturally – Opinion is split over the effectiveness of Viagra to combat Alzheimer’s

Robert Howard, a professor of old-age psychiatry at University College London, said the results “failed to excite” him.

However, some academics were more upbeat about the research. Dr Jack Auty from the University of Tasmania, for example, said there were clear issues with the paper, but the approach and findings were “exciting”, “fascinating” and “fantastic”.

“We need further research. In the field of Alzheimer’s disease research, we have been excited by many drugs over the years, only to have our hopes dashed in clinical trials. I will be following this research group and the research around sildenafil closely,” he said.

Dr Susan Kohlhaas, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Developing drugs for diseases like Alzheimer’s, which attack the brain, is a costly process and can take many years.

“Being able to repurpose a drug already licensed for other health conditions could help speed up the drug discovery process and bring about life-changing dementia treatments sooner.”

Dr Ivan Koychev, the senior clinical researcher at the University of Oxford, called the study “an exciting development”, adding: “This ‘repurposing’ approach can reduce the drug discovery period by years and reduce the risk of failure as we already know how safe these drugs are in humans.”

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