my personal edition > alzheimer's > news


  E-Mail this DGDispatch to a colleague

DGDispatch

Statins May Help Prevent Alzheimer's Disease: Presented at AAN

By Jill Stein

Special to DG News

DENVER, CO -- April 16, 2002 -- New data suggest that statin medications may thwart the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

The research was presented at the 54^th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), on behalf of the Multi-Institutional Research in Alzheimer's Genetic Epidemiology (MIRAGE) Study Group, in Boston, Massachusetts..

Dr. Robert C. Green and associates at Boston University School of Medicine found that statin treatment yielded a decrease in AD risk, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.21. Anti-hypercholesterolemic medications other than statins had a modest but insignificant effect on AD risk, they say.

They caution that further study is needed. "While the data are encouraging, we cannot recommend the use of statins to prevent or treat Alzheimer's disease until the findings have been confirmed prospectively," the researchers say.

While two earlier observational studies had suggested that statins might be associated with a decreased risk of AD, the results were limited by shortcomings in trial design. In both studies, for example, cases and non-cases were classified in non-standardized fashion by clinicians in practice, and the temporal relationship between statin use and the onset of dementia was not clear. In addition, the earlier investigations did not include African-Americans, did not control for educational background, and did not evaluate the effect of APOE genotype.

In this study, neither African American ethnicity, nor the presence of the APOE e4 allele modifies the statin-AD risk association.

The researchers conducted a family-based, case-control study of 2,581 subjects, 614 of whom were African-American. Data were obtained using standardized, validated questionnaires.

Subjects included 912 persons with probable or definite AD by research criteria and 1,669 of their non-demented relatives. "Studying family members is useful because family members share many of the same environmental aspects such as socioeconomic status, diet, and neighborhood."

The relationship between statin use and the risk of AD was evaluated using generalized estimating equations, adjusting for age, sex, ethnicity, history of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and APOE genotype.

The investigators say their study is the largest investigation to document a possible protective effect of statins against AD.

E-Mail this DGDispatch to a colleague

To print, use this version