Prozac may help cut risk of eyesight fading when you get older
PROZAC may help protect people from eye problems in old age, a study suggests.
The antidepressant, also known as fluoxetine, is often taken once a day to help people suffering with depression but researchers at the University of Virginia in the US believe it may have an added bonus in that it staves off agerelated macular degeneration.
The condition commonly occurs after a person turns 50 and leads to worsening sight. One in 20 over-65s in the UK is believed to suffer with the affliction, which is irreversible and has no cure.
It is caused when chunks of rogue DNA awaken and activate a destructive part of the immune system which then degrades cells in the retina.
Lab tests done by Dr Bradley Gelfand found Prozac stops this process from occurring, and analysis of more than 100million Americans aged over 50 found people taking Prozac as a mental health treatment were 15 per cent less likely to develop the condition.
“These findings are an exciting example of the promise of drug repurposing, using existing medicines in new and unexpected ways,” said Dr Gelfand, of UVA’S Centre for Advanced Vision Science. “Ultimately, the best way to test whether fluoxetine benefits macular degeneration is to run a prospective clinical trial.
“While we have had a great deal of success with the approach of using realworld patient data, we may have only
‘These findings are an exciting example of the promise of drug repurposing, using existing medicines in new and unexpected ways’
begun to scratch the surface of finding new uses for old drugs,” said Dr Gelfand.
“It is tempting to think about all the untapped therapeutic potential of medicines sitting on pharmacy shelves.”
Scientists across the spectrum of disciplines are trying to find effective ways of repurposing drugs, as developing a treatment from scratch is not guaranteed to work, takes several years and is often prohibitively expensive.
“On average, a new Fda-approved drug takes 10 to 12 years and costs $2.8billion (£2billion) to develop,” the researchers write in their paper, published in PNAS. “Our identification of the unrecognised therapeutic activity of an existing Fda-approved drug using Big Data mining, coupled with demonstrating its efficacy in a disease-relevant model could greatly accelerate and reduce the cost of drug development.”
Data stemmed from the databases of medical insurance companies, and included details on a person’s medication schedule as well as any health concerns. Researchers looked at the anonymised data of US citizens between 2010 and 2018 and accounted for factors such as race, age, gender, smoking an weight.
One database, which featured 15million records, showed the antidepressant made people 22 per cent less likely to develop age-related macular degeneration. However, in the database of 90million individuals, the protective effect was just a 9 per cent drop in risk.
After combining the two, the team found Prozac had a 15 per cent protective effect against the disease.