A £50,000 grant from the Alzheimer's Research Trust will look at whether ACE inhibitors used to treat Alzheimer's could have a longer term effect.
Researchers from Bristol and Edinburgh are joining forces to investigate the longer term effects of a class of drugs that have been suggested to slow memory loss in people with
Alzheimer's.
The two teams have received a £50,000 boost from the UK's leading dementia research charity, the Alzheimer's Research Trust, to look at whether blood pressure lowering drugs called Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme or ACE inhibitors also alter the build up of the protein amyloid which ‘clogs up' the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.
The two-year project led by Dr Patrick Kehoe at the University of Bristol's Dementia Research Group and Dr Karen Horsburgh at the University of Edinburgh hopes to find out more about ACE inhibitors, a group of pharmaceuticals that are used primarily in the treatment of high blood pressure and congestive heart failure. Because lowering blood pressure has recently been shown to slow the rate of memory loss in people with early Alzheimer's, some experts hoped that ACE-inhibitors might be useful drugs for fighting the disease.
However, Dr Kehoe and Dr Horsburgh have concerns that while these drugs might be useful in the short term they could potentially worsen a person's Alzheimer's disease in the longer term because ACE, the enzyme that they inhibit, has been suggested to partly protect the brain from the toxic build up of amyloid.
Dr Kehoe explains: "This work is really testing a theory and will try to clarify and if possible reconcile what appear to be slightly opposed theories in the field. On one hand some experts suggest these drugs may be helpful against Alzheimer's associated memory decline. On the other hand, the drugs theoretically might reduce the protection the brain naturally offers itself – so we really need to understand more about what is going on."