Study: Sniffing Insulin Help Memory Alzheimer’s Patients

By: Michael Stevens
07/19/2010 07:43 AM ET

Sniffing insulin help memory Alzheimer’s patients. A new study suggests that Alzheimer’s Patients that sniff insulin will help in the early stages of the disease and memory loss. It’s the latest health research for Alzheimer’s that can provide hope for patients and their memory.

“We believe our results are very promising, and they warrant future trials,” Dr. Suzanne Craft, VA Puget Sound Health Care System and the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. Dr. Craft presented her findings at a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu. The Alzhemier’s patients who received the treatment for four months showed improvements in tests of memory recall that lasted for two months.

Alzheimer’s disease is a fatal and so far incurable deterioration of the brain that affects 26 million people globally. It is the most common form of dementia. According to several studies people with Alzheimer’s have reduced levels of insulin in the brain, even in the earliest stages.

Dr. Craft’s research team wanted to see what the results would be if they delivered insulin to the brain directly. These research subjects included 109 non-diabetic patients with Alzheimer’s disease or a precursor condition called mild cognitive impairment. A third of the patients received a placebo and the other two-thirds received different doses of insulin that had been loaded into a nebulizer and squirted up their nose twice daily for four months.

The patients that received the lower dose of insulin showed significant improvements on all primary measures of thinking, memory and in a test of their ability to do daily activities. The team found that the 15 insulin-treated patients who received a spinal tap had a link between improved memory and improvements in measurements of key proteins linked with Alzheimer’s disease. Current Alzheimer’s drugs only treat symptoms. None of them have been shown to improve memory in patients with Alzheimer’s.

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