Anti-HIV treatments could combat Alzheimer's disease

A recent study suggests that certain antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV could also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers from Sanford Burnham Prebys have found that HIV-positive individuals treated with reverse transcriptase inhibitors, a class of antiretroviral drugs, show a much lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease compared to the general population.


To better understand this potential link, researchers reviewed the anonymized medical records of over 225,000 patients. Among approximately 80,000 HIV-positive patients over the age of 60, more than 46,000 had been treated with reverse transcriptase inhibitors between 2016 and 2019. The results showed that the incidence of Alzheimer's disease was 2.46 cases per 1,000 individuals among HIV-positive patients on the treatment, versus 6.15 cases per 1,000 in the general population.

These findings follow earlier work that showed that genes associated with Alzheimer's disease could be recombined by enzymes similar to those targeted by HIV treatments. This discovery paves the way for new therapeutic strategies using existing medications to combat the growing crisis of Alzheimer's disease.

Professor Jerold Chun, the lead author of the study, emphasizes that these results are encouraging but that further research is necessary to better understand the underlying mechanisms. The drugs studied were designed to target HIV reverse transcriptases, but it is likely that they have only had a limited effect on the many types of enzymes present in the brain.

The next steps will involve identifying which versions of reverse transcriptases are involved in Alzheimer's disease to develop more targeted treatments. In the meantime, prospective clinical trials of currently available reverse transcriptase inhibitors could be considered for people with early-stage Alzheimer's disease.