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The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s
Medicine had nothing to offer my father and millions of other Americans. I set out to find out why.
By Joanne Silberner
January 4, 2023
In the mid-1990s, my father, a gentle and kind man who loved being around people, began avoiding social contact, embarrassed by his inability to remember words and faces. He had been a brilliant physician until Alzheimer’s disease started eroding his brain. By the time my sister, mother, and I convinced him to get checked out, he couldn’t draw a clock with the numbers in the correct location, couldn’t be trusted to drive, and stared blankly at his neurologist when asked the name of the current U.S. president. (Though he delighted his politically aligned doctor by answering, after a long pause, “I don’t remember his name, but I do remember I don’t like him.”)
By 2003, my father got lost in familiar places, and was deeply depressed. It was that year, as a reporter for NPR, that I sat through the FDA hearing on a new Alzheimer’s drug, Namenda. From the data that were presented, I could see that it didn’t do much to help people suffering from the disease. At the same time, as is true for most Alzheimer’s families, I was desperate to latch on to anything that might keep my dad from slipping away. So when the drug was approved, my sister and I dutifully fed those useless pills to my father as he slowly forgot the last few decades of his life.
He died in 2006. “I can’t remember your name,” he’d say to visitors just before the end. “But I remember that I like you.”
Namenda, which blocks a brain neurotransmitter, is still on the market, along with another class of drugs that came out a few years before that stimulates a different neurotransmitter. Yet, as an AARP report put it in 2018, such drugs are unable to address “the underlying cause of the disease,” or “delay institutionalization, improve quality of life or lessen the burden on caregivers.”
Recently, you might have heard the news that all this may be changing. The two manufacturers of a drug called lecanemab, a twice-monthly intravenous infusion, are hoping the FDA gives them accelerated approval this week. A “consensus statement” signed by more than 200 Alzheimer’s researchers—many of whom have consulted for the companies—declared that lecanemab is a “foundational gamechanger.” Press reports have described the results of a clinical trial as “momentous,” a possible “triumphant turning point,” and perhaps the beginning of “a new era.”
That this drug is being heralded as a breakthrough is a statement on how miserable the state of Alzheimer’s research is.
At best, lecanemab might slightly slow a patient’s inevitable decline for a few months. As Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who found the results “pretty impressive,” said: “It was a modest clinical response—it didn’t stop the disease, it didn’t make anybody better, not that it was supposed to.”
In other words, more than a decade-and-a-half since my father’s death, the more than six million American families with a loved one with Alzheimer’s are facing exactly the same fate as mine. While treatments for diseases such as many cancers, some autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, and HIV have undergone revolutions during this period, Alzheimer’s has defied all attempts at altering the course of this brain-robbing disease. The treatments that are always promised are still around a distant corner.
I have covered medical news for decades. I am a big believer in medicine’s triumphs—so was my dad. But why did medicine have nothing to offer my family and so many like ours?
I set out to discover why...
The Reason There’s Been No Cure for Alzheimer’s
Medicine had nothing to offer my father and millions of other Americans. I set out to find out why.
By Joanne Silberner
January 4, 2023
In the mid-1990s, my father, a gentle and kind man who loved being around people, began avoiding social contact, embarrassed by his inability to remember words and faces. He had been a brilliant physician until Alzheimer’s disease started eroding his brain. By the time my sister, mother, and I convinced him to get checked out, he couldn’t draw a clock with the numbers in the correct location, couldn’t be trusted to drive, and stared blankly at his neurologist when asked the name of the current U.S. president. (Though he delighted his politically aligned doctor by answering, after a long pause, “I don’t remember his name, but I do remember I don’t like him.”)
By 2003, my father got lost in familiar places, and was deeply depressed. It was that year, as a reporter for NPR, that I sat through the FDA hearing on a new Alzheimer’s drug, Namenda. From the data that were presented, I could see that it didn’t do much to help people suffering from the disease. At the same time, as is true for most Alzheimer’s families, I was desperate to latch on to anything that might keep my dad from slipping away. So when the drug was approved, my sister and I dutifully fed those useless pills to my father as he slowly forgot the last few decades of his life.
He died in 2006. “I can’t remember your name,” he’d say to visitors just before the end. “But I remember that I like you.”
Namenda, which blocks a brain neurotransmitter, is still on the market, along with another class of drugs that came out a few years before that stimulates a different neurotransmitter. Yet, as an AARP report put it in 2018, such drugs are unable to address “the underlying cause of the disease,” or “delay institutionalization, improve quality of life or lessen the burden on caregivers.”
Recently, you might have heard the news that all this may be changing. The two manufacturers of a drug called lecanemab, a twice-monthly intravenous infusion, are hoping the FDA gives them accelerated approval this week. A “consensus statement” signed by more than 200 Alzheimer’s researchers—many of whom have consulted for the companies—declared that lecanemab is a “foundational gamechanger.” Press reports have described the results of a clinical trial as “momentous,” a possible “triumphant turning point,” and perhaps the beginning of “a new era.”
That this drug is being heralded as a breakthrough is a statement on how miserable the state of Alzheimer’s research is.
At best, lecanemab might slightly slow a patient’s inevitable decline for a few months. As Dr. Ronald C. Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, who found the results “pretty impressive,” said: “It was a modest clinical response—it didn’t stop the disease, it didn’t make anybody better, not that it was supposed to.”
In other words, more than a decade-and-a-half since my father’s death, the more than six million American families with a loved one with Alzheimer’s are facing exactly the same fate as mine. While treatments for diseases such as many cancers, some autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, and HIV have undergone revolutions during this period, Alzheimer’s has defied all attempts at altering the course of this brain-robbing disease. The treatments that are always promised are still around a distant corner.
I have covered medical news for decades. I am a big believer in medicine’s triumphs—so was my dad. But why did medicine have nothing to offer my family and so many like ours?
I set out to discover why...