Is the new magic drug coming?

According to the World Health Organization, more than 55 million people worldwide are suffering from dementia, and 60%-70% of cases are related to Alzheimer's disease

According to the current scientific research on the disease mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease, the mainstream theory believes that this type of disease is mainly related to β-amyloid and tau protein.

However, in the past, almost none of the treatments for these two markers passed the clinical trial stage, mainly because the effectiveness of the treatments was very limited

They will score based on the degree to which the drug participates in the two protein molecular networks.

▲The study set up more than 10 disease-related phenotypes to conduct association analysis on drugs (picture source: reference [2])

Researchers are not surprised by this, because some studies have shown that sildenafil can improve cognitive ability and memory

They mainly focused on the differences between sildenafil users and non-users, and compared several current drugs, such as losartan (losartan), metformin (metformin) and sidium which are being clinically studied for Alzheimer's disease.

During the 6-year follow-up, the researchers found that compared with people who had never used sildenafil, the use of sildenafil was associated with a 69% reduction in the risk of Alzheimer's disease

And sildenafil can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people who already have coronary heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, which can be regarded as complications of Alzheimer's disease

In addition, the researchers initially explored the mechanism by which sildenafil reduces the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.

It is worth mentioning that the current research is still the result of correlation analysis, not causality

Note: The original text has been deleted

Reference materials:

[1] Study identifies sildenafil ascandidate drug for Alzheimer's disease.

[2] Feixiong Cheng, Endophenotype-based insilico network medicine discovery combined with insurance record data miningidentifies sildenafil as a candidate drug for Alzheimer's disease, Nature Aging(2021).