“An unexpected turning point”: HIV drug could help treat Alzheimer’s disease

Un médicament contre le VIH pour traiter la maladie d’Alzheimer

La prise en charge de la maladie d'Alzheimer pourrait connaître un tournant inattendu. Une récente étude menée par des scientifiques de San Diego révèle un lien surprenant entre les médicaments anti-VIH et une réduction du risque de développer cette maladie neurodégénérative.

Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, affects more than 50 million people worldwide. And while research is progressing, there is still no preventive or curative treatment. 

Researchers from Sanford Burnham Prebys in San Diego (United States) have just discovered an unexpected lead. They thus looked at the role of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. The latter is capable of converting RNA into DNA.

It is used by HIV to genetically hijack human cells and cause chronic infection. This is why today there are drugs called "reverse transcriptase inhibitors" to treat HIV.

But let’s come back to Alzheimer’s disease. Well according to scientists, the latter uses the same type of enzyme as that present in HIV.

Three times fewer cases

Based on this observation, the team sought to find out if this type of treatment could be effective against the risk of dementia. To do this, they analyzed the medical records of more than 225,000 patients, 80,000 of whom were HIV positive, treated with anti-HIV drugs that inhibit reverse transcriptase.

And the results are astonishing: HIV-positive patients under treatment had a significantly lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than the general population (2.46 per 1,000 in the HIV-positive group compared to 6 .15 per 1,000 in the general population).

"What we observed is very rudimentary", the authors acknowledge. "The next step will be to identify which versions of reverse transcriptases are at work in Alzheimer’s disease so that more targeted treatments can be discovered.& quot;