Diabetes Medicine Rosiglitazone Shows Promise For Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease

Initial studies on the diabetes drug, rosiglitazone, show that the medication may improve memory and cognitive performance of patients with Alzheimer's Disease. Initial lab test on rosiglitazone appears to restore the brain signals needed for proper brain cognition.

Alzheimer's Disease is a condition that affects the patient's brain functions such as memory, thinking, cognition, and psychological behavior. It is a type of dementia that slowly progresses throughout the whole of the brain destroying healthy brain cells.

Alzheimer's disease has no known cure and is caused by protein fragments in the brain called plaques. These plaques form into the alzheimer protein that is responsible for the destruction of healthy brain cells.

Diabetes Drug Metformin Increases Growth of Brain Cells

Metformin is in the Biguanides Class of Drugs

Metformin is an antidiabetic drug that is taken orally. Metformin is prescribed to people who have type 2 diabetes, in particular with overweight and obese people and those with normal kidney function.

Metformin works by suppressing the production of glucose in the liver. It is the most widely prescribed antidiabetic drug in the world. In the United States alone, more than 48 million prescriptions were filled in 2010 for its generic formulations.

Currently, metformin is the standard treatment for young people with type 2 diabetes and the only oral drug approved for this use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Diabetes drug makes brain cells grow

The discovery is an important step toward therapies that aim to repair the brain not by introducing new stem cells but rather by spurring those that are already present into action, says the study's lead author Freda Miller of the University of Toronto-affiliated Hospital for Sick Children. The fact that it's a drug that is so widely used and so safe makes the news all that much better.

Earlier work by Miller's team highlighted a pathway known as aPKC-CBP for its essential role in telling neural stem cells where and when to differentiate into mature neurons. As it happened, others had found before them that the same pathway is important for the metabolic effects of the drug metformin, but in liver cells.