Diabetes treatment may contain dementia and Alzheimer's disease

Patients taking medications for type 2 diabetes can keep Alzheimer's disease at bay.

USC Dornsife psychologists found that patients with untreated diabetes developed signs of Alzheimer's disease 1.6 times faster than those without diabetes.

The study was published on March 4 in the journal Diabetic treatments.

"Our findings underscore the importance of catching diabetes or other metabolic diseases in adults as early as possible," says Daniel A. Nation, a psychologist at the College of Letters, at the University of Ottawa. USC Dornsife art and science. "Among people with diabetes, the difference in the rate of development of the signs of dementia and Alzheimer's is clearly related in one way or another to the fact that they take it or not medicines to treat it. "

Nation states that this study could be the first to compare the rate of development of the pathology of Alzheimer's disease and dementia in people with normal glucose levels, prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, treated or not.

For this study, the scientists compared the "tau pathology" – the progression of brain entanglements that characterize Alzheimer's disease. When entanglements combine with sticky beta-amyloid plaques – a toxic protein – they disrupt signals between brain cells, impairing memory and other functions.

Nation and Elissa McIntosh, a doctoral student at USC Dornsife Ph.D. in psychology, badyzed the data collected by the Alzheimer's Imaging Initiative on 1,289 people aged 55 and over. The data included biomarkers for diabetes and vascular disease, brain scans and a range of health indicators, including memory test performance.

Nation and McIntosh were able to badyze data for a duration of 10 years, while for others, they were one or four years old.

Of 900 of these patients, 54 had type 2 diabetes but were untreated while 67 were on treatment.

Most participants in the study – 530 – had normal blood glucose levels, while 250 had prediabetes (hyperglycemia).

The researchers compared the results of brain and cerebrospinal fluid tests that could indicate signs of amyloid plaques and brain entanglements among the different categories of diabetic patients.

"It's possible that drugs to treat diabetes will make a difference in the progression of brain degeneration," Nation said. "But it's unclear exactly how these drugs might slow down or prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease, so we need to study this."

Scientists increasingly view Alzheimer's disease as the result of a cascade of multiple problems, rather than being triggered by one or two. Composition factors range from exposure to pollution and genetics (the ApoE4 gene, for example) to heart disease and metabolic diseases.

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University of Southern California