The drug sildenafil, a generic form of the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra, holds promise for preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.
Over a six-year period, users of sildenafil were found to have 69% lower odds of developing Alzheimer’s than their peers who did not use the drug, investigators from the Cleveland Clinic reported.
The study is the offshoot of a project to find drugs with good potential for repurposing as dementia drugs. Sildenafil, which has been shown to significantly improve cognition and memory in preclinical models, emerged as the best candidate among 1,600 existing medications analyzed, said study lead Feixiong Cheng, Ph.D., of the Cleveland Clinic’s Genomic Medicine Institute.
Cheng’s subsequent analysis showed the link between taking the drug, which is also approved to treat high blood pressure (Revatio), and lowered dementia risk.
“Notably, we found that sildenafil use reduced the likelihood of Alzheimer’s in individuals with coronary artery disease, hypertension and type 2 diabetes, all of which are comorbidities significantly associated with risk of the disease, as well as in those without,” Cheng added.
The researchers now are planning trials to test causality and to confirm sildenafil’s clinical benefits for Alzheimer’s patients.
“We also foresee our approach being applied to other neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to accelerate the drug discovery process,” Cheng concluded.
Full findings were published in the journal Nature Aging.
