By Gabe Romain
Betterhumans Staff
10/5/2004 3:35 PM

A common antibiotic appears to protect nerve cells from dying, a study on rats has found, suggesting that it could be used to treat motor neuron diseases in humans.

Researcher Ken Ikeda and colleagues at the Toho University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan have found that minocycline, an antibiotic used to treat a variety of infections, protected the motor neurons of rats when administered at high doses.

Motor neurons are neurons that activate muscle cells. In motor neuron diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), motor neurons become damaged, affecting voluntary muscle movement.

While minocycline is currently being tested in a clinical trial of ALS patients, the doses of the drug are low relative to the doses used in the current study on rodents.

Minocycline diet

For their study, Ikeda and colleagues added minocycline to the diets of rats with damage to the motor neurons that control facial muscles.

The researchers found that the antibiotic was able to both protect motor neurons that would have otherwise died and prevent the activation of nearby cells called microglia, which may contribute to motor neuron degeneration.

The doses of minocycline administered to the rats were 10 to 20 times higher than the doses typically given to humans. The researchers point out that if the current ALS trial should yield insignificant results, it may be because the doses of the drug were too low to be effective.

The research was reported in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the annual meeting of the American Neurological Association.