CLEVELAND (WFLA) — A new study has proposed that Alzheimer’s disease can be successfully reversed instead of just being slowed down.
The study, which was published in Cell Reports Medicine, said studies of mice brains showed a potential that advanced Alzheimer’s could be reversed by restoring the brain’s neural balance through nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) homeostasis.
According to the study, Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia and is expected to affect over 150 million people by 2050.
“Through our study, we demonstrated one drug-based way to accomplish this in animal models, and also identified candidate proteins in the human AD brain that may relate to the ability to reverse AD,” said Dr. Kalyani Chaubey, the leader of the study.
NAD+ is a naturally produced chemical that helps the body produce energy, but its levels decline as people age. This loss of NAD+ levels is more severe in humans with Alzheimer’s.
While AD is a uniquely human disease, the mice in the study were genetically engineered to have mutations that cause the condition. Mouse models also found a significant decline in NAD+ levels among those with advanced Alzheimer’s.
According to a release from University Hospitals in Cleveland, which contributed to the study, the body’s cells cannot function properly or survive without the “proper NAD+ balance.”
Building on research into NAD+ balance and its role in the recovery from severe brain injuries, the researchers proposed that preventing NAD+ loss or restoring the brain’s NAD+ balance could prevent or even reverse Alzheimer’s.
This is where the good news comes in.
Using a compound called P7C3-A20, the scientists were not only able to prevent mice with two different lines of mutations from developing Alzheimer’s, but they were also able to reverse the disease in mice that were in the advanced stages of the disease.
Current over-the-counter NAD+ precursors have been found to raise NAD+ to dangerous levels that could pose a cancer risk. According to the researchers, P7C3-A20 gets around this by helping cells maintain their own NAD+ balance within the normal range.
“We were very excited and encouraged by our results,” said Dr. Andrew A. Pieper, senior author of the study. “Restoring the brain’s energy balance achieved pathological and functional recovery in both lines of mice with advanced Alzheimer’s. Seeing this effect in two very different animal models, each driven by different genetic causes, strengthens the idea that restoring the brain’s NAD+ balance might help patients recover from Alzheimer’s.”
Previous treatments of Alzheimer’s have focused more on preventing or slowing the disease’s progression, but with these results, Pieper said it could show new hope for patients that they may actually regain what they lost.
“The key takeaway is a message of hope – the effects of Alzheimer’s disease may not be inevitably permanent,” Pieper said. “The damaged brain can, under some conditions, repair itself and regain function.”
The study did state that there were some limitations to the research. It did not establish NAD+ levels as the cause and relied on genetic mouse models that were bred to develop the condition.
Actual Alzheimer’s in humans is usually sporadic Alzheimer’s disease, which means that it is not caused by a single gene that is passed down. Instead, the disease manifests from a complex combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors and can happen in any person at any point in their lifetime, with the greatest risk factor being a person’s age.
According to the Alzheimer’s Society, people can have “susceptibility genes,” but they do not cause the disease directly. They only make you more likely to develop it.
Because of this, the study suggested that multiple factors may be driving brain cells into an unsustainable demand for repair that then disrupts NAD+ balance, but the cause is still not yet known.
As for the next step, Pieper said trials must be done to see if the results can be replicated in human patients.
“Additional next steps for the laboratory research include pinpointing which aspects of brain energy balance are most important for recovery, identifying and evaluating complementary approaches to Alzheimer’s reversal, and investigating whether this recovery approach is also effective in other forms of chronic, age-related neurodegenerative disease,” he said.