thank you to givewell an organization that makes it easy to find excellent charities to trust for sponsoring today's episode click on the link below to donate and be sure to use the fundraiser code scishow at checkout to make sure your donation gets matched one of the biggest questions in medicine right now is how to prevent alzheimer's disease it's a fatal disease that damages the brain and destroys neurons first in areas involved in memory and then beyond and it affects tens of millions of people worldwide but every day researchers are looking for ways to cure or prevent it and in a paper published monday in the journal nature aging one team may have found a promising candidate it's called sildenafil and it is a currently prescribed medication it's prescribed for high blood pressure and for erectile dysfunction one reason it's hard to prevent alzheimer's is because scientists don't fully understand what causes it still one thing they do know is what the disease looks like in the brain brains affected by alzheimer's are famous for having clumps or tangles of certain proteins that block communication between neurons they're called amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles and most of the drugs developed for alzheimer's have tried to address at least one of them but in this new study the team wasn't trying to invent an alzheimer's drug they were trying to identify drugs that already exist that might treat the disease first they characterize traits that previous studies have identified as having some relationship to alzheimer's like specific genes and their protein products then they did a computer-based analysis to see what drugs interact with those traits what kinds of data are available about them and how effective they might be and in the end their most promising candidate was sildenafil among other things this drug has already been shown to reduce the severity of neurofibrillary tangles in mouse models of alzheimer's next they look to see if there was any link between sildenafil and alzheimer's in a huge medical data set they analyzed insurance data from more than NUMBER_TOKEN million people in the u.s and they found that after six years people who used sildenafil were NUMBER_TOKEN less likely to have developed alzheimer's disease compared to similar patients who didn't use the drug nice or at least they were NUMBER_TOKEN less likely to have filed an insurance claim about it which is a pretty good surrogate as for why this would happen while the researchers ran tests on neuronal cells to find out in one experiment they grew neurons from cells taken from patients with alzheimer's and then treated them with sildenafil and after six days of treatment one thing they found was that the treated neurons had more neurite growth than the control cells in other words the branches coming off of their neurons had grown more now all that said this paper does not prove that sildenafil prevents alzheimer's this is a promising lead but to know how effective this drug is researchers will need to do rigorous randomized clinical trials but hey maybe this is how it starts right now scientists have an interesting connection and with a lot of research and testing it could become more but there's a long way to go before we know for sure in completely different news scientists have also published new findings about hydra not the mythological serpents not the villains from the marvel movies
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