Is Alzheimer’s Disease Autoimmune Inflammation of the Brain That Can be Treated With Nasal Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs?

Abstract

The Alzheimer’s Association recently reported that a woman’s estimated lifetime risk of developing Alzheimer’s at age 65 is 1 in 6, compared to nearly 1 in 11 for a man (ie, female to male ratio 1.8). Based on female to male ratio, Alzheimer’s disease could well be an autoimmune disorder. Like Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune inflammation of the central nervous system, has a female to male ratio of 2.3. Also based on female to male ratio, Alzheimer’s resembles the autoimmune inflammatory disease rheumatoid arthritis, which has a female to male ratio of 2.7. The reasons for the female preponderance in autoimmune disease are unclear, but nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are widely and successfully employed to treat autoimmune anti-inflammatory disease and dramatically relieve symptoms. Moreover, oral NSAIDs consistently reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, although they have been totally ineffective as a treatment in multiple failed clinical trials. A basis for this failure might well be that the brain dose after oral administration is too small and not sufficiently early in the pathogenesis of the disorder. But NSAID brain dose could be significantly increased by delivering the NSAIDs intranasally.