Hopes common drug will help dementia patients
Australian researchers are hoping the use of a common psychiatric drug will slow the progression of the nation's second most common type of dementia behind Alzheimer's.
Frontotemporal dementia typically affects people in their 50s and 60s and there is currently no treatment to stop or even slow the disease.
Doctor John Kwok from Neuroscience Research Australia says frontotemporal dementia can have a huge impact on the lives of people who are unlucky enough to suffer from it.
"In Alzheimer's disease we get memory problems, in frontotemporal dementia it is actually a much more severe kind of dementia," he said.
"If you get the disease, you get it at a much earlier age and its symptoms are more behavioural so you forget how to speak, you forget how to behave in a correct manner to other people."
Dr Kwok has found a genetic explanation for the disease.
People with the disease have abnormal protein clumps which cause brain cell death and other disease symptoms. The clumps are caused by a gene mutation.
Dr Kwok says now that the link is understood, it turns out that helpful drugs already exist.
"There are drugs out there like haloperidol, which is traditionally used to treat schizophrenia that we know will have a dampening effect on the sigma gene," he said.
"So previously what might have taken us about five years to validate our findings and try and find a successful cure for [something] such as frontotemporal dementia - hopefully because we know there are drugs out there already on the market that are safe to use, that the time between discovery of the gene and finding an effective cure would be about two years."
Because the drug is already on the market, there is no requirement to do the kind of safety tests that would apply to an entirely new drug.
The CEO of Neuroscience Research Australia, Professor Peter Schofield, says more advanced testing has already begun, and the treatment may be available within a few years.
"Typically research would run from labs, through animal models, through to clinical testing," he said.
"[We're] now working at the animal model stage and working at the design of what might be a suitable experimental paradigm for that clinical testing work based on our laboratory results."
Haloperidol can have some significant side effects but Dr Kwok says because it will be prescribed at a much lower dosage than for schizophrenia, it will not be as much of a concern.
"In our studies in our laboratories what we've shown in steps, unlike the current therapeutic dose for haloperidol, we can use about 10 to 100 fold less of the drug to have an effective treatment for frontotemporal dementia."