Erectile dysfunction drugs may be associated with lower risk of Alzheimer’s

The drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction could be associated with a lower risk of developing the disease Alzheimer’ssays a study published today by Neurology.

The work does not prove that these types of medications reduce the risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s, “it only shows an association,” highlighted the American Academy of Neurology, which publishes the aforementioned magazine.

The research, led by University College London, examined the medical records of 269,725 men with an average age of 59 who had recently been diagnosed with erectile dysfunctionbut who did not have memory or thinking problems at the beginning of the study.

It compared 55% of the participants who had been prescribed drugs for erectile dysfunction with 45% those who don’t.

They had an average follow-up of about five years and, during that period, 1,119 people developed the disease. Alzheimer’s.

The data collected was adjusted for other factors that could affect the rate of Alzheimer’s, such as age, smoking and alcohol consumption.

The result was that people taking anti-inflammatory drugs erectile dysfunction They were 18% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not, adds the note from the American Academy of Neurology.

The research was based on prescription records and the authors indicated that the association between medication and disease risk reduction was greater in those who received more prescriptions during the study period.

Additionally, they said one of the limitations of the paper is that it is based on the amount of prescription use, so they did not have information on whether participants actually used the drugs.

The director of the study, Ruth Brauer, from University College, estimated that “more research is needed to confirm these findings, learn more about the possible benefits and mechanisms of these drugs, and study the optimal dosage.”

Commenting on the research, in which he did not participate, Ivan Koychev, from the University of Oxford, highlighted precisely the limitation of using the number of recipes to collect data.

”These types of drugs are usually taken on an as-needed basis, so it is difficult to know how much was actually taken and how often,” he told the Science Media Centre, a science resource base for journalists.

Furthermore, he estimated that “the relationship with the disease of Alzheimer’sis particularly controversial, since it is known that a significant proportion of dementia cases clinically diagnosed as Alzheimer’s present additional or alternative pathologies.

Researcher Tara Spiers-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, reiterated that the study “does not conclusively prove” that anti-inflammatory drugs erectile dysfunction reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, “but it provides good evidence that it is worth continuing to study this type of drugs in the future.”

The research director of the British Alzheimer’s Reseach Leah Mursaleen He agreed that it is “an encouraging finding,” but that it still does not confirm whether “they are directly responsible for reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s, nor whether they can slow down or stop the disease.”

For this reason, he estimated, more research will be necessary—including clinical trials— to confirm whether they may play a role in the prevention or treatment of Alzheimer’s and establish whether they may have effects on other groups, such as women and men without a diagnosis of erectile function.

This is not the first time that a study links Alzheimer’s and these medications. Nature Aging published research in 2021 that identified sildenafil – the active ingredient used by some drugs to treat erectile dysfunction – as a potential medication to prevent and treat that disease.