Viagra may help prevent dementia, an Oxford trial has suggested.
The drug, also known as sildenafil, is used to treat erectile dysfunction in men and improves blood flow.
Patients taking the little blue pill had increased function in their brain blood vessels, the study showed for the first time.
Scientists believe this improvement in cerebral blood flow could help treat vascular dementia, a form of the disease caused by reduced blood flow to the brain. There are no specific vascular dementia therapies currently available.
Dr Alastair Webb, study author and associate professor at the Wolfson Centre for Prevention of Stroke and Dementia at Oxford, said: “This is the first trial to show that sildenafil gets into the blood vessels in the brain in people with this condition, improving blood flow and how responsive these blood vessels are.
“These two key factors are associated with chronic damage to the small blood vessels in the brain, which is the commonest cause of vascular dementia.
“This demonstrates the potential of this well-tolerated, widely available drug to prevent dementia, which needs testing in larger trials.”
The study, published in Circulation Research, involved 75 people who had experienced a minor stroke and showed signs of mild to moderate small vessel disease.
Everyone received Viagra, a placebo, and cilostazol (a similar drug) over three-week periods in a random order.
The researchers found that Viagra increased blood flow in both large and small brain vessels, and both Viagra and cilostazol lowered blood vessel resistance in the brain.
Additionally, Viagra caused fewer side effects than cilostazol, particularly with less incidence of diarrhoea.
The researchers say further larger trials are needed to confirm these findings and explore sildenafil’s potential in preventing vascular dementia on a broader scale.
The study comes as researchers from Queen Mary University of London have developed a way to use MRI brain scans to predict dementia up to nine years before diagnosis.
Predict dementia nine years early
It is the first time scientists have found a way to use brain scans to spot signs of deterioration. fMRI scans are able to analyse the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which kicks in when the brain is idle.
Scientists looked at brain scans from more than 1,100 people from UK Biobank, a database containing genetic and health information from half a million people in the UK.
Among the 103 people who had dementia, 81 had brain scans between five months and 8.5 years before being officially diagnosed. The scans revealed that people who would go on to be diagnosed with dementia had a weaker DMN.
Data, published in the journal Nature Mental Health, show that the brain scan approach is able to predict dementia up to nine years before diagnosis, with 80 per cent accuracy.
“Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia,” said study author Prof Charles Marshall.
“Although we are getting better at detecting the proteins in the brain that can cause Alzheimer’s disease, many people live for decades with these proteins in their brain without developing symptoms of dementia.
“We hope that the measure of brain function that we have developed will allow us to be much more precise about whether someone is actually going to develop dementia, and how soon, so that we can identify whether they might benefit from future treatments.”
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