Namenda & Side-Effects
A team of investigators unraveled exactly how Namenda helps Alzheimer's patients without causing serious side effects.
Alzheimer's disease destroys brain cells and their connections (called synapses), causing memory loss and other cognitive problems that disrupt work, hobbies and daily life. Symptoms can be alleviated, in part, by the drug Namenda (marketed in some countries as Ebixa, generically known as memantine).
New research shows a unique advantage of Namenda. Researchers revealed a signaling process that normally helps a healthy brain to communicate. This process can destroy brain cells when it sends the wrong signal. It seems that Namenda can tell the difference between the two, allowing the process to do its job when signals work properly, while blocking it whenever signals will be destructive.
Namenda is currently FDA-approved to treat moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's disease. It was, in part, developed by Stuart A. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Del E. Web Center for Neuroscience, Aging and Stem Cell Research at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham).
Namenda improves symptoms by blocking abnormal activity of glutamate, a chemical that transmits messages between nerve cells.
In a study appearing August 18 in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team of investigators at Sanford-Burnham led by Dr. Lipton unravel exactly how Namenda helps Alzheimer's patients without causing serious side effects.
"While Namenda is partially effective in treating Alzheimer's disease, one of its major advantages is how safe and well-tolerated it is clinically," said Dr. Lipton
In treating any disease, one of the most difficult parts of designing a new drug is finding ways to maximize its beneficial effect while minimizing harmful side effects. Namenda is a particularly safe treatment for Alzheimer's disease because it dampens excessive glutamate signaling that occurs away from synapses without blocking glutamate activity at the synapses. This is important because interfering with synaptic glutamate signaling would disrupt normal brain activity.
"We showed definitively for the first time that Namenda, the drug our group developed for Alzheimer's disease, works in a unique way," Dr. Lipton said.
"It inhibits a protein that binds glutamate called the NMDA receptor, but predominantly blocks NMDA receptors that signal molecularly to cause neuronal injury and death. It spares the synaptic receptors that mediate normal communication between nerve cells in the brain."
This finding helps explain why the drug is so well tolerated by Alzheimer's patients and might provide hints for the development of future therapies targeting the NMDA receptor and similar cellular machinery in other diseases.
Namenda is now available in an XR and a generic to save money and take fewer doses a day. Go to www.alzheimersweekly.com/treatment/namenda-&-side-effects-a804.html
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