Type II Diabetes and / or its treatment leads to less cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease patient

DOMINGUEZ, RAUL; MARSCHOFF, ENRIQUE; GONZALEZ, SILVIA; REPETTO, MARISA; SERRA, JORGE

DIABETES RESEARCH AND CLINICAL PRACTICE

ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD

Lugar: Ireland; Año: 2012 vol. 98 p. 68 - 74

0168-8227

Alzheimer?s disease (AD) is a progressive dementia disorder characterized clinically by impairment of memory, cognition and behavior. A major research interest in AD progression has recently been placed on early evaluation, with the hope of finding the earliest clinical and cognitive manifestations of the pathology onset. Diabetes is one of the clinical conditions that represent the greatest risk of developing oxidative stress. Glucose overload may damage the cells and severity affect mitochondrial metabolism, leading to the development of impaired-induced insulin secretion in Type II Diabetes Mellitus (DIAB) and has been reported that could have significant potential to slow or deter AD pathogenesis. The aim of this work was to evaluate the cognitive performance on a homogeneous population of AD patients with (AD+DIAB) and without superimposed DIAB as compared to non-demented DIAB patients and healthy control subjects. The degree of cognitive impairment was studied by the Alzheimer?s Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog) score; the severity of dementia was quantified with the Folstein?s Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) test and the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) test; the Hamilton test was employed to evaluate depressive conditions. Present results indicate that cognitive deterioration, as reflected for the MMSE and ADAS-Cog test, is statistically significantly lower in AD patients with superimposed DIAB (p < 0.05) as compared with pure AD patients. In this protocol of studying patients with AD, the superimposed condition of AD+DIAB was associated with a lower rate of cognitive decline, while DIAB patients and controls present normal scores.