Researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University have “really exciting” news on a drug to treat patients with the second-most common form of dementia in people under 60, resulting in a stabilising of escalating behavioural issues, and a reversal of brain shrinkage due to the disease.
It is the second clinical trial to show that the drug, sodium selenate, may be slowing behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) that can occur in people as young as 35 years of age, the university said in a statement.
There are no treatments or cures for bvFTD and typical survival is five to seven years from diagnosis.
The Monash Phase 1 trial, the only one in Australia targeting this type of bvFTD, and one of a handful worldwide, showed that sodium selenate is safe and well-tolerated in patients with bvFTD over a period of 12 months.
BvFTD is the second most common type of dementia in people aged under 60 and affects about 50,000 Australians.
The results from the trial, led by Dr Lucy Vivash from Monash University’s Department of Neuroscience, have just been published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.
In almost half of the cases with bvFTD, the damage to the neurons in the brain is caused by the build-up of a protein called Tau. This protein is a major target for research in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s and dementia, as a way to reverse the neurodegeneration caused by this Tau accumulation.
Sodium selenate upregulates an enzyme in the brain that effectively attacks the Tau protein, said Dr Vivash.
The research group is now conducting a larger study at many hospitals across Australia and New Zealand to further test whether this drug is beneficial for patients with bvFTD.
