These drugs may successfully prevent dementia in high-risk individuals with mild or moderate type 2 diabetes.
According to the scientists, it could be worthwhile to prioritize these drugs for future repurposing research.
According to a long-term study recently published in the open-access journal BMJ Open Diabetes Research & Care, using the diabetes drug known as glitazones is associated with a 22% lower risk of dementia. Glitazones are often known as thiazolidinediones or TZDs for short and are an older class of type 2 diabetes drugs.
According to the researchers, these drugs may effectively prevent dementia in high-risk individuals with mild to moderate type 2 diabetes, and it may now be worthwhile to give them priority in future clinical trials to determine whether they can be repurposed.
Researchers have begun to investigate whether diabetes drugs could potentially help prevent or cure dementia since type 2 diabetes and dementia share several physiological patterns. However, the results have been inconsistent thus far.
The researchers compared the incidence of dementia in older adults with type 2 diabetes who were receiving either sulfonylurea or thiazolidinedione (TZD) with those receiving metformin alone in order to shed further light on this.
They used data from 559,106 individuals with type 2 diabetes who had been diagnosed in the national Veteran Affairs (VA) Health System between January 2000 and December 2019.
Only older patients (aged at least 60) and given a first prescription of metformin, a sulfonylurea (tolbutamide, glimepiride, glipizide, or glyburide), or a TZD (rosiglitazone or pioglitazone) between January 2001 and December 2017 were included (559,106) in the study. Their health was tracked for an average of nearly 8 years.
After at least 1 year of drug treatment, the use of a TZD alone was associated with a 22% lower risk of dementia from any cause, compared with the use of metformin alone.
Specifically, it was associated with an 11% lower risk of DOI: 10.1136/bmjdrc-2022-002894
The study was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
