Low-dose aspirin doesn't protect women against overall cognitive decline, a finding that adds to doubts about whether anti-inflammatory drugs offer any neuroprotective benefit.
Among more than 6,000 healthy women who took low-dose aspirin or placebo for a decade, there were no significant between-group differences in overall cognitive function, rate of cognitive decline, or risk for serious decline, reported Jae Hee Kang, Sc.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital here, and colleagues.
"In this study, we observed no apparent benefit of low-dose aspirin in slowing cognitive decline over four years," the authors wrote online in BMJ. "Other methods for preserving cognitive function in older people need to be investigated."
Women who took aspirin had a 20% lower risk for decline in category fluency, the authors noted, but the effect seen with this secondary endpoint was not enough to tip the scales in aspirin's favor.
Earlier this week, two other NSAIDs were shown to offer no protective benefit against Alzheimer's, investigators reported online in Neurology. Neither naproxen (Aleve) nor celecoxib (Celebrex) reduced the risk of developing Alzheimer's, at least in the short term, found researchers in the ADAPT (Alzheimer's Disease Anti-inflammatory Prevention Trial) study
According to results of the randomized ADAPT study funded by the National Institute on Aging, there was even a suggestion that both naproxen and celecoxib were associated with a slightly increased risk of dementia.
Interest in the use of NSAIDs for Alzheimer's prevention was sparked by a study, published in Neurology in 1993, indicating that indomethacin in doses of 100 to 150 mg/day appeared to protect mild-to-moderately impaired Alzheimer's patients from the degree of cognitive decline exhibited by well-matched controls.
But results from randomized trials conducted since have been inconclusive or have shown no neuroprotective benefit for the NSAIDs rofecoxib, naproxen, nimesulide, and diclofenac, the ADAPT investigators noted.
No comments:
Post a Comment