14 DAY TRIAL // Alzheimer's disease if the most common form of dementia, affecting over 24 million people worldwide. It is degenerative, terminal and there's no known cure for it at the moment, which makes it an even scarier prospect than many of the other frightening demons of modern times, cancer and AIDS among them. Losing our "mind" - our reasoning abilities, our memory and the ability to care for ourselves, all of this in a ruthless progression over a long interval of time can be seen by some as just about the most traumatizing and heartbreaking prospect imaginable. In their struggle to come up with a way to potentially prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease, researchers have come up with a rather unexpected answer: common, everyday painkillers.
Previous research had suggested that Alzheimer's could be prevented by regular use of a group of drugs known among scientists as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication (or NSAIDs for short), the most common and widely-known such medicine being ibuprofen, naproxen and the ever-so-amazing aspirin. The latest and largest study conducted on this theme found that of the 14,000 people whose medicine intake had been closely monitored, those who used ibuprofen, aspirin and naproxen regularly had a 23% lower risk of getting Alzheimer's than those who never used them. However, scientists warn us that it's not a good idea to start taking these drugs in large quantities over a prolonged period of time, since they have also been linked with a number of serious side-effects, such as stomach bleeding.
The answer, scientists now believe, lies not in taking aspirin and ibuprofen blindly as such, but rather researching the anti-dementia effects of the substances that go into them, and developing new drugs that have the same beneficial properties, minus the side-effects. "There is a growing body of evidence on the protective effects of NSAIDs and Alzheimer's disease. [...] There are already ongoing clinical trials looking at the benefits of treatments with similar properties in people with Alzheimer's disease. It is now up to researchers to develop these latest findings into safe and effective treatments for Alzheimer's" commented Professor Clive Ballard, director of research at the British Alzheimer's Society.