PARIS: After decades of unsuccessful research, two new drugs and a pioneering blood test have recently given Alzheimer’s patients hope of fighting back against the debilitating disease — but questions remain about their effectiveness.
Any path toward a cure also remains elusive for Alzheimer’s, which accounts for around 70 percent of dementia cases worldwide and is a leading cause of death among the elderly.
Ahead of Alzheimer’s Day on Sunday, here is what to know about recent advances to prevent, diagnose and treat the disease.
How effective are the new drugs?
Billions of dollars have been spent trying to find a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease over the decades, but those efforts have stubbornly fallen short — at least until recently.
Eli Lilly’s donanemab and Biogen and Eisai’s lecanemab are the first treatments proven to significantly slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.
But the expensive treatments are only modestly effective, and work only for patients at an early stage of the disease. There can also be serious side effects including potentially deadly brain haemorrhages.
That has sparked a debate about whether the benefits of the drugs outweigh the risks, leading to national health regulators taking different stances.
Lecanemab, which is sold under the brand name Leqembi, has been approved in many countries including the United States.
But French health authorities advised the state-run insurance system not to reimburse payment for the drug.
It followed in the footsteps of the UK’s state-run health service, whose spending watchdog said this year that both new Alzheimer’s drugs did not show enough benefits given their price.
What about early diagnosis?
Another debate roiling Alzheimer’s research — and which has also seen a growing divide between Europe and the United States — revolves around how to diagnose the disease.
The standard method of diagnosing Alzheimer’s has required an invasive and expensive lumbar puncture, which can rule out some more at-risk patients.
But a simple blood test that detects “biological markers” of the disease has recently been developed.
US authorities have authorised the test since May, but Europe has not yet approved any Alzheimer’s blood test, one of which is the subject of a recently launched national clinical trial in Britain.
The question is whether the blood test will ever be enough by itself to confidently diagnose the disease.
Last year the US nonprofit Alzheimer’s Association changed its criteria to say that biomarkers alone were sufficient.
But in Europe, most specialists think a thorough clinical exam will still be needed to confirm a person’s cognitive and functional decline.