Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, affects more than 50 million people worldwide. And although research continues, there is still no preventive or curative treatment.
However, researchers from Sanford Burnham Prebys in San Diego (USA) have just discovered an unexpected clue. So they looked at the role of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. The latter is capable of converting RNA into DNA.
HIV uses it to genetically hijack human cells and cause a chronic infection. This is why today there are drugs called “reverse transcriptase inhibitors” to treat HIV.
But let’s return to Alzheimer’s disease. According to scientists, the latter uses the same type of enzyme as HIV.
Three times fewer cases
Based on this observation, the team tried to find out whether this type of treatment could be effective against the risk of dementia.
To do this, they analyzed the medical records of more than 225,000 patients, 80,000 of whom were HIV-positive and receiving anti-HIV drugs that inhibit reverse transcriptase.
And the results are striking: HIV-positive patients on treatment had a significantly lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease than the general population (2.46 per 1,000 in the HIV-positive group compared with 6.15 per 1,000 in the general population) .
” What we observed is very elementary,” admit the authors. “The next step will be to determine which versions of reverse transcriptases work in Alzheimer’s disease so that more targeted treatments can be found. »
Source : Pharmaceuticals
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