Blood pressure compound may benefit brain tumo...( WINSTON-SALEM N.C. A widely used bl...),Health

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. A widely used blood pressure medication may be the key to preventing brain function loss common after radiation treatment, according to a newly published study by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. The findings offer the hope of an improved quality of life for cancer patients.

Using a rat model, the study drew on a hypothesis from previous studies that a compound similar to the anti-hypertensive drug losartan can prevent the cognition loss that has been closely-associated with radiation therapy for brain tumor treatment.

The findings, recently published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics, appear to validate the hypothesis in rats and researchers are optimistic that the same theory could easily be applied in a human clinical trial setting because the drug used has a long-established safety profile in patients who have taken it to treat high blood pressure.

"We need to kill cancer cells but also prevent or reduce treatment-related side effects," said Mike E. Robbins, Ph.D., a professor in the department of radiation oncology at the Brain Tumor Center of Excellence, part of Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "One very interesting feature of this compound is that it has never shown any pro-tumor effects. If anything, it appears to have anti-tumor properties. We're very close to having a compound that will protect the normal brain from cognitive injury as a result of radiation and, at the same time, we may very well increase the likelihood of one day curing brain cancer patients of their tumors."

Researchers have theorized from previous studies that radiation may lead to the overproduction of angiotensin II (Ang II), a peptide that has been associated with decline of brain function. By blocking the binding of Ang II to the Ang type I receptor in patients receiving radiation, researchers hypothesized that they could prevent or hin
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