Dr Doug Brown, Director of Research and Development at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “It’s promising news that the arthritis drug salsalate could potentially reduce the accumulation of one of the toxic proteins that characterises both Alzheimer’s disease and Frontotemporal dementia. None of the current dementia treatments target this specific protein, tau, which creates tangles in the brain that gradually destroy healthy nerve cells. While scientists are still not absolutely sure what causes Alzheimer’s or Frontotemporal dementia, the hope is that this type of treatment could be one way of slowing down the progression of the disease.