Alzheimer's Progress: Statins and a Vaccine

Researchers have followed up a hunch that Alzheimer's disease is linked with high cholesterol. Tests on Alzheimer's patients with Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, have found improvements in many of the patients.

Last year, [D. Larry Sparks, PhD, head of the Roberts Laboratory for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Ariz] .reported encouraging early results from a study in which people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease took Lipitor. Now Sparks and colleagues report their final results, based on 63 Alzheimer's patients who finished at least three months of Lipitor treatment.

'Patients were better after six months of treatment than they were at the start,' Sparks tells WebMD. 'It was noticeable to their doctors at the end of a year. There were patients who were on Lipitor for a whole year and then went off it. And after a month, their family members said to put them back on the drug. So the improvement is enough for families to notice the difference.'

People who have Alzheimer's disease can have depression that typically worsens as the disease progresses. Unexpectedly, the Alzheimer's patients who took Lipitor were significantly less depressed than they were at the beginning of the study."

Other researchers are forging ahead on a potential Alzheimer's vaccine that showed some good effects on volunteers, along with some untoward side effects that included brain inflammation..

But two new studies that followed the participants suggest that the approach may slow the memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease by reducing the buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.

"The idea of inducing the immune system to view beta-amyloid as a foreign protein, and to attack it, holds great promise," says researcher Sid Gilman, MD, a neurologist at the University of Michigan Health System, in a news release. "We now need to see whether we can create an immune response safely and in a way that slows the progression of Alzheimer's disease and preserves cognition."