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A drug approved for Alzheimer's disease boosts social functioning in autistic children, according to a study carried out from January 2015 to July 2018.
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A drug approved for Alzheimer’s disease boosts social functioning in autistic children, according to a new study.
A randomized clinical trial involving 42 participants found that the drug, memantine, resulted in better social interactions and communication, researchers said in the study published on Oct. 1 by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The trial, which was also placebo-controlled and double-blind, was carried out from January 2015 to July 2018. Participants had been diagnosed with autism and had IQs of at least 85. They were recruited from psychiatry clinics.
Thirty-three youth completed the trial, including 16 who received memantine.
Nine out of 16 of the memantine recipients showed improvements in social functioning, as marked in scores on a responsiveness scale and rated by clinicians, compared with 21 percent of placebo recipients.
Some people with autism have abnormally high levels of glutamate, a neurotransmitter, in the brain. Memantine modulates glutamate.
“If you have elevated blood glucose, we prescribe antidiabetic medications to decrease blood sugar levels. In the same way, we looked to see if glutamate modulators could improve social functioning in autism for individuals with abnormally high brain glutamate levels,” Dr. Gagan Joshi, director of the Bressler Program for Autism Spectrum Disorder at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the researchers who worked on the trial, said in a statement. “We saw that patients who responded to memantine became more socially engaged.”
The study was funded by money from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers reported numerous conflicts of interest, including payments from pharmaceutical companies, although none make memantine at present.
Limitations of the study included the small size of the trial, the researchers said.
Autism is a disorder characterized by a range of symptoms that can include difficulty communicating. No drugs are approved for autism, although officials recently announced that a folinic acid medication called leucovorin will be approved for people with cerebral folate deficiency, including some autistic individuals.
Memantine lowers glutamate activity by attaching to N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors. The Food and Drug Administration approved it in 2003 to treat moderate to severe dementia from Alzheimer’s.
Some previous studies, including a 2013 trial in Iran, have found that children who received memantine experienced an improvement in autism symptoms. A U.S. study published in 2017 found no differences between memantine and placebo recipients.
Daniel Felsky, who has a doctorate in neuroimaging and genetics of Alzheimer’s disease, said in a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the new trial showed the potential of memantine for autistic people but said additional research should be conducted on the drug and that the results may not carry to all populations, pointing to how most participants were male.
“In our study, participants who responded to memantine showed improvements in social competence and a reduction in autism symptom severity, although they continued to experience milder features of autism,” Joshi said. “Larger clinical trials could help assess memantine responses in broader populations.”
