Alzheimer Disease Drug Could Benefit Traumatic Brain Injury Outcomes

Memantine, a drug commonly used for the treatment of Alzheimer disease, could benefit patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), according to the results of a recent study.

For their study, the researchers randomly assigned 41 adults with moderate TBI to either standard TBI treatment or standard treatment plus enteral memantine 30 mg twice daily for 7 days. The researchers used the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) and measurements of serum levels of neuron-specific enolase (NSE), a marker of neuronal damage, to measure patient outcomes.
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Baseline patient characteristics and serum NSE levels were not significantly different between the groups. However, the mean serum NSE levels for the memantine and control groups were 7.95 ± 2.86 and 12.33 ± 7.09 ng/mL, respectively, on day 3, and 5.03 ± 3.25 and 10.04 ± 5.72 ng/mL, respectively, on day 7. The mean GCS on day 3 was 12.3 ± 2.0 and 10.9 ± 1.9 in the memantine and control groups, respectively.

“Administration of memantine started quickly after moderate TBI resulted in a significant reduction of the neuronal damage marker NSE, which coincided with marked day-to-day improvements in GCS scores on all study days,” the researchers concluded. “Larger multicenter trials with prolonged outcome assessments are needed to validate our findings.”

—Michael Potts

Reference:

Mokhtari M, Nayeb-Aghaei H, Kouchek M, et al. Effect of memantine on serum levels of neuron-specific enolase and on the glasgow coma scale in patients with moderate traumatic brain injury [published online July 19, 2017]. ACCP. doi: 10.1002/jcph.980.