A patient with Alzheimer’s disease has made a rapid and dramatic improvement after being given an experimental treatment by two doctors in California.

They injected a drug developed to treat rheumatoid arthritis into the spine of the patient, an 81-year-old doctor. Before the treatment he was in good physical health and speaking fluently, but could not remember where he was, the day of the week, his birthday or the names of his doctors.

After the spinal injection of the drug etanercept, improvement was rapid, Edward Tobinick and Hyman Gross report in Journal of Neuroinflammation. When examined two hours later the patient remembered that he was in California and he could recall his doctor’s name. Asked to name objects shown on a series of pictures, he was right nine times out of ten. He was correct just once before the treatment.

On a formal test, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, his score improved from 7 out of a possible 30 to 15.

The rationale for the treatment is that etanercept is an antibody-based drug that acts against a compound called tumour necrosis factor (TNF) that is active in causing inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis. The authors believe that TNF is also involved in the processes in Alzheimer’s disease that disrupt brain functioning.

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