TOKYO (XINHUA) - Japan's Yamagata University has found that a drug being developed for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia, is also effective in treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), local media reported Friday (Dec 24).

The state-run university on Friday said that the drug has been found capable of curbing the abnormal agglomeration of protein that causes the progressive neurodegenerative disease.

ALS causes muscles to weaken and eventually paralyse by killing motor neurons.

People with the disease will lose their ability to walk, talk, eat and eventually breathe, with current drugs only slowing the progress of the disease.

The developing medicine will be the first of its kind to work on protein accumulated in the brain and spinal cord, according to Dr Takeo Kato, chief of the Yamagata National Hospital's ALS treatment research centre.

The fatal disease is characterised by the aggregation of ubiquitinated proteins in affected motor neurons, but the research team has succeeded in curbing the aggregation of proteins in mice with lab-grown ALS by administering the drug candidate.

However, the experiment was conducted on mice suffering from a less common type of ALS.

The research team will now carry out experiments on mice with the more common sporadic or non-inherited ALS, hoping to start clinical trials involving human patients in three years.

According to data from Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma, around 10,000 people in Japan suffer from ALS, and each year, about 1,000 to 2,000 people are newly diagnosed with the disease.