Alzheimer Drug Promising for some TBI Victims
Many traumatic brain injury victims have a 400 percent increase risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in life. Now a new class of Alzheimer’s disease drugs may prevent long-term damage associated with traumatic brain injuries. According to a study of mice by Georgetown University Medical Center researchers, gamma-secretase inhibitors were used to target amyloid plaque that accumulates in the brain of those with Alzheimer’s disease.
“No one knows why it occurs, but abnormal amounts of amyloid plaque have been found during an autopsy in about a third of brain injury victims, some of whom were children who would ordinarily never have had these deposits,” Mark Burns, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at Georgetown and the study's lead author, said in a university news release. “In this study, we show that the same pathways activated chronically in Alzheimer's disease are activated acutely in traumatic brain injury and that they appear to play a very important role in secondary injury.”The researchers findings are published online in Nature Medicine showing that mice who were administered gamma-secretase inhibitors had a decreased production of amyloid plaque, thus theoretically preventing long-term and continuing damage to the brain following the injury.
“This is an exciting finding that we hope can be readily tested in patients with traumatic brain injury,” Burns said.
