Aspirin against Alzheimer's? – Daily health care

An animal model study of Alzheimer's disease (5XFAD mice) showed that aspirin stimulates the production of lysosomes (organelles designated to remove "waste" from the cell); this suggests, according to the authors, that the known platelet antiplatelet could play a role in the treatment of Alzheimer's storage diseases and lysosomes, by reducing the accumulation of undesirable and harmful material at the same time. Inside cells

10 JUL – A good old low dose aspirin could be a treatment for Alzheimer's disease. This is suggested by a study of the Rush University Medical Center, published in Journal of Neuroscience .
The news, all to be validated in humans (the study was conducted on mice), immediately bounced enthusiastically in the press around the world. And the reason is easy to understand. On the one hand, a terrible pathology, more and more widespread, still largely mysterious and substantially devoid of therapies; on the other, a drug known to all, readily available and at a very low cost. The right ingredients to start dreaming are all here.

But all that glitters is not gold. Some studies conducted in the past have shown a correlation (but not a causal relationship) between the use of aspirin and the reduction of risk and prevalence of Alzheimer's disease. But a systematic review, published in Stroke a few years ago, has launched an alert on the risk of intracranial bleeding in patients with Alzheimer's disease with aspirin; the authors therefore concluded that in the absence of clear cardiovascular indications for treatment with aspirin, it would be best to avoid it in patients with the disease. Alzheimer.

Regardless of the "warnings" of this work, Sujyoti Chandra and his colleagues at Rush University in Chicago went to examine the effect of aspirin on the plaques of beta-amyloid proteins that accumulate in the brain of subjects suffering from Alzheimer's disease and supposed to represent the main pathophysiological mechanism underlying dementia and memory loss typical of this disease.

Lysosomes play a central role in cellular homeostasis by regulating machinery for the elimination of cellular wastes. An impaired function of these organelles can be found in lysosomal storage diseases and in certain neurodegenerative disorders; for this reason, among the possible targets for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, there is also that of the improvement of lysosomal clearance

An important "change" of the Biogenesis of lysosomes is the EB transcription factor (TFEB) and the US researchers in this study showed that aspirin is able to increase TFEB and therefore lysosomal biogenesis in brain cells.
Aspirin, on the other hand, induces the activation of PPAR-alpha and stimulates transcription of Tfeb, through PPAR-alpha.

The authors of the study then went on to see on the animal model (the mouse) whether all of these effects of aspirin observed in vitro were reproducible also in vivo . In this regard, they administered 5XFAD mice (Alzheimer's animal model) to low-dose aspirin for a month, noting that this treatment effectively reduces amyloid plaques in alpha-dependent PPARs. These findings reveal a new effect of aspirin that, according to the study's authors, could therefore be useful in the treatment of Alzheimer's storage diseases and lysosomes.

Maria Rita Montebelli

July 10, 2018
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