14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists believe they may have finally discovered an answer to the puzzling question of why forms of dementia such as Alzheimer's disease cannot be addressed with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) in real-life, when animal models and cell culture studies prove that these chemicals are effective.
NSAID have been tested extensively as a potential answer to the global Alzheimer's epidemic. In the lab, they appear to be having great effects in treating the molecular causes of dementia, but clinical trials conducted on human patients have thus far yielded very poor results.
In the new study, researchers Oliver Brüstle and Philipp Koch, both with the Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology, at the University of Bonn, in Germany, demonstrate that neurons in the human brain are resistant to this entire class of drugs. Their work is detailed in the latest online issue of the journal Stem Cell Reports.
“The results of our study are significant for future drug development approaches, because they imply that compound screening and validation studies might be much more reliable if they are conducted using the human cell type affected by the disease in question,” explains Brüstle, quoted by PsychCentral.