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Drugs developed to slow down the progress of Alzheimer's disease may protect patients at risk of eye damage from glaucoma, according to research published earlier this week.

UK scientists have identified for the first time that key proteins involved in Alzheimer's are also implicated in glaucoma, and suggest that there are strong similarities between the two conditions. However, they have stressed that the 500,000 people in the UK with glaucoma are not at a higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

The research was carried out by a team of scientists at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and funded by the Wellcome Trust. They developed a new technology for visualising nerve cell damage in the retina, known as detection of apoptosing retinal cells to demonstrate that the protein beta-amyloid, which causes the so-called 'plaque' lesions in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, also leads to nerve cell death in the retina.

'We've seen for the first time that there is a clear link between what causes Alzheimer's disease and one of the basic mechanisms behind glaucoma,' said study leader Dr Francesca Cordeiro from UCL.

In experiments on rats, Dr Cordeiro and her team showed that drugs that work to prevent the build-up of beta-amyloid in Alzheimer's patients' brains can delay the onset of glaucoma in animal models. One such drug, Bapineuzumab, is already being tested in clinical trials on Alzheimer's patients in the US and Ireland. However, researchers found that it was even more effective when combined with two other novel Alzheimer's treatments.

'We are trying a new approach that has never been tried before, not even to treat Alzheimer's disease,' said Dr Cordeiro. 'Our success in treating glaucoma in the lab by combining different Alzheimer's treatments represents a brand new strategy.'

David Wright, chief executive of the International Glaucoma Association, said that the research findings were an 'interesting' development and had the potential to change the treatment options for glaucoma patients in the future.

'If the clinical trials are successful and then this can potentially offer a second way of treating glaucoma patients,' he said.

'Since we have shown that drugs for Alzheimer's disease can tackle glaucoma,' Dr Cordeiro added, 'then potentially we could use damaged retina to screen for Alzheimer's drugs that target amyloid-beta build-up.'

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