Drugs found not helpful for Alzheimer's

WASHINGTON, April 23 (UPI) -- Hopes that anti-inflammatory drugs may help in warding off Alzheimer's disease and other dementias have been set back by a new study, researchers say.

The study, to be released this week in the medical journal Neurology, indicates that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as naproxen and ibuprofen not only don't decrease the risk of dementia in elderly patients, they actually increase it, USA Today reported Thursday.

"We had high hopes that these non-steroidal arthritis drugs might play a role, in part because other studies had been promising," said study author Eric Larson, executive director of the Seattle HMO Group Health Center for Health.

In the study, researchers looked at 2,736 elderly Group Health members, tracking them for 12 years to see if they developed dementias such as Alzheimer's disease. Some 476 of them developed dementia over the period. Researchers found that heavy users of anti-inflammatory drugs had a 66 percent higher risk of developing the condition than those with low or no use, the newspaper said.