Apples for Health- Drug rescues memory in Alzheimer's mice

Drug rescues memory in Alzheimer's mice

IRVINE, Calif., July 15 (UPI) -- The drug PMX205 rescued memory in mice exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said.
Lead author Andrea Tenner of the University of California at Irvine said the drug -- similar to one used in clinical trials for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis -- prevented inflamed immune cells from gathering in brain regions with Alzheimer's lesions called amyloid plaques.
Cell inflammation in these areas accelerates neuron damage, exacerbating the disease, Tenner said.
"We used a multidisciplinary approach combining an understanding of immunology and neurobiology to uncover a completely different target than other therapies," Tenner said in a statement.
For 12 weeks, Tenner and colleagues added PMX205 to the drinking water of mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms. Scientists gave the treated mice learning and memory tests and then examined their brains for Alzheimer's.
The study, published in the Journal of Immunology, found mice that were not given the drug performed significantly worse on the tests. In all but one case, the treated Alzheimer's mice performed almost as well as the normal mice.
Those with the rescued cognitive ability had more than 50 percent fewer Alzheimer's lesions and inflammatory immune cells than the untreated diseased mice, Tenner said.