Aging nicotine research

Researchers are trying to treat early stage memory loss with nicotine patches to prevent those diagnosed from moving on to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, according to a story on tennessean.com.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) is collaborating with the University of Southern California on a two-year trial to see if mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can be treated, possibly preventing those people from moving into more progressive forms of memory loss.

There are said to be more than eight million people in the US with an MCI diagnosis.

“We believe that many if not most of the patients, if untreated, will go on to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease or something similar,” said Dr. Paul Newhouse, director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at VUMC and national director of the study.

Newhouse said his team would like to use the treatment to see if they can both reduce memory loss and prolong the period in which sufferers functioned well.

The researchers are in the early stages of enrolling 300 people to take part in the trial.

The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, is following up on decades of such research.

An earlier study showed the treatment worked for up to six months, while the new research is scheduled to follow people for two years to see if improvements are sustained.