Drugs that battle HIV and hepatitis B might be able to help people avoid Alzheimer’s disease, a new study says.
Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) are used to prevent HIV and hepatitis B from replicating and spreading inside a person’s body.
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Now, a new analysis shows that people taking NRTI pills have as much as a 13% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s for each year they’re on the medications.
“It’s estimated that over 10 million people around the world develop Alzheimer’s disease annually,” senior researcher Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, founding director of the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Vision Science, said in a news release.
“Our results suggest that taking these drugs could prevent approximately 1 million new cases of Alzheimer’s disease every year,” he added.
Based on these results, the research team is calling for clinical trials to test NRTIs’ effectiveness in preventing HIV.
NRTIs work by blocking an enzyme that HIV needs to make copies of itself. They include tenofovir (Viread, Vemlidy), entecavir (Baraclude), lamivudine (Epivir), abacavir (Ziagen) zidovudine (Retrovir) emtricitabine (Emtriva) and adefovir (Hepsera), according to Drugs.com.
But Ambati and his team have previously shown that NRTIs also prevent the activation of inflammasomes, immune system proteins that have been implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
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To see whether that action could protect against Alzheimer’s, the researchers reviewed 24 years of patient data from the U.S. Veterans Health Administration and 14 years of data from a database of privately insured patients.
The two data pools included 11 million V.A. patients from 2000 to 2024 and 158 million patients with employer-provided health insurance from 2006 to 2020.
Researchers looked for patients who were at least 50 and taking NRTIs for either HIV or hepatitis B, and identified more than 270,000. The team then compared their rates of Alzheimer’s against the rest of the patient pools.
Results showed that for every year a person took NRTIs, they had a “significant and substantial” reduction in their risk for Alzheimer’s:
This reduction held even after adjusting for other factors that could increase a person’s Alzheimer’s risk, researchers noted.
“We have also developed a new inflammasome-blocking drug called K9, which is a safer and more effective version of NRTIs,” Ambati said. “This drug is already in clinical trials for other diseases, and we plan to also test K9 in Alzheimer’s disease.”
The new study appears in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.