Honolulu, July 16: Squirting insulin up the noses of patients with early forms of Alzheimer’s disease showed signs of improving their memory, US researchers said.
Patients who got the treatment for four months showed improvements in tests of memory recall that lasted for two months.
“We believe our results are very promising and they warrant future trials,” said Dr. Suzanne Craft of the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and the University of Washington in Seattle, who presented her findings at a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu.
Alzheimer’s disease is a fatal and incurable deterioration of the brain that affects 26 million people globally. It is the most common form of dementia.
Several studies have suggested that people with Alzheimer’s have reduced levels of insulin in the brain, even in the earliest stages. Insulin is important for communication between brain cells and is needed for brain function.
Craft’s team wanted to see what would happen if they delivered insulin directly to the brain. They studied 109 non-diabetic patients with Alzhe-imer’s disease or a precursor condition called mild cognitive impairment.
A third of the patients got a placebo and the other two-thirds received different doses of insulin twice daily for four months. Patients who got the lower dose of insulin showed good impro-vements on all primary measures of thinking and memory and in a test of their ability to do daily activities.
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