In the United States, every 67 seconds, one person is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.. Today, more than 5 million Americans live with the disease, which is responsible for half a million deaths each year, according to Pannochka, an online publication for girls and women aged 14 to 35.. net Therefore, scientists from the United States do not stop the search for new ways to combat Alzheimer's disease.

So, the other day, researchers from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center (Winston-Salem, North Carolina) announced that an insulin nasal spray can be an effective treatment for this disease..

A team of scientists led by Dr. Suzanne Craft, professor of gerontology and geriatrics at Wake Forest, has long found that insulin nasal spray helps patients with mild cognitive impairment - they account for 10-20% of older people over 65 years of age.. In September 2011, Medical News Today reported that Dr. Kraft and her collaborators found that insulin spray could improve memory in patients with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of cognitive impairment..

In the latest study, Dr. Kraft's team tried giving patients 20-40 international units (IU) of insulin as a nasal spray.. But now they were using insulin detemir, a long-acting analogue of human insulin..

Improving Working Memory in MCI and Alzheimer's Disease 60 adult participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease received 20 IU placebo or 20 and 40 IU of insulin detemir nasal spray each day for 21 days.

The results of the study, which were published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, suggest that patients receiving 40 IU of insulin detemir show a significant improvement in working memory - the ability to retain and process current information..

Moreover, participants in the study who received 40 IU of insulin detemir and had the APOE-e4 gene (associated with risk of Alzheimer's disease) showed even better test results compared to participants on a low dose of insulin or placebo.. Participants lacking the APOE-e4 gene performed worse on tests of working memory, both with insulin and placebo.

Evaluating the safety of the new therapy, the researchers concluded that 20-40 IU of insulin detemir does not cause any serious side effects.. Commenting on the findings, Dr. Kraft said: “Our study provides preliminary evidence that insulin detemir may be an effective treatment option for people with MCI and Alzheimer's disease.. The same has been demonstrated in our past work with regular insulin.. We are particularly encouraged that it is now possible to significantly improve memory in patients with the APOE-e4 gene, as these patients are usually resistant to other therapies.”.

Researchers say more research is needed to understand how insulin works in dementia. They cannot explain this mechanism, nor the fact that insulin works best in people with the APOE-e4 gene.. Insulin safety in MCI is also a topic for future work..

Last month, eLife magazine reported on how researchers have learned to recover lost memories in patients with early Alzheimer's disease.. The lead author of this study, Dr. David Glanzman of the University of California at Los Angeles, reported that in order to do this, they stimulated the regeneration of broken neural connections in the diseased brain..

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