Glucosamine supplements may speed memory loss from Alzheimer’s, new research shows

People with Alzheimer’s disease who took the common supplement glucosamine were 25% more likely to die within five years than those who didn’t. That’s the key finding of a new study that my colleagues and I published in the journal Nature Metabolism. Glucosamine is a sugar molecule that’s sold over the counter as a remedy for joint pain and arthritis. More than 40 million Americans take it each year. We found that glucosamine also affected people in the earliest stage of memory loss, a condition called mild cognitive impairment. People in this early stage of dementia who were taking glucosamine were 25% more likely to progress to full Alzheimer’s. Our analysis of patients with Alzheimer’s disease was based on anonymized medical records from the University of Florida Health system. We included 24,000 patients with dementia and 41,000 with mild cognitive impairment, comparing people who took glucosamine with those who didn’t. We then conducted experiments in mice engineered to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms to identify the potential mechanism behind how glucosamine may affect the brain. We found that blocking the enzyme that makes sugars like glucosamine improved dementia symptoms in mice. In contrast, feeding those same mice glucosamine made memory loss worse.…

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