It is a fact that Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting over 24 million people worldwide. It is degenerative, terminal and there’s no known cure for it at the moment, which makes it an even scarier prospect than many of the other frightening demons of modern times, cancer and AIDS among them. Losing our “mind” – our reasoning abilities, our memory and the ability to care for ourselves, all of this in a ruthless progression over a long interval of time can be seen by some as just about the most traumatizing and heartbreaking prospect imaginable.
Research had suggested that Alzheimer’s could be prevented by regular use of a group of drugs known among scientists as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication (or NSAIDs for short), the most common and widely-known such medicine being ibuprofen, naproxen and the ever-so-amazing aspirin. However, scientists warn us that it’s not a good idea to start taking these drugs in large quantities over a prolonged period of time, since they have also been linked with a number of serious side-effects, such as stomach bleeding.
The answer, scientists now believe, lies not in taking aspirin and ibuprofen blindly as such, but rather researching the anti-dementia effects of the substances that go into them, and developing new drugs that have the same beneficial properties, minus the side-effects.
Related posts:
Comments are closed.