UPDATE: Edited title and parts of the story to indicate that this is not a full stage-3 trial, so the results are not yet guaranteed.
Anyone who has had a friend or relative slide into the bottomless pit of Alzheimers, never to return, will find this bit of news a bright spot for the future. According to a story on the Daily Mail's website, there's a new daily medicine that may, according to a stage-2 drug trial, slow or totally halt the progression of Alzheimers.
This new treatment, a drug called Rember, appears to be significantly better than the best treatments available today:
After 50 weeks, those with both mild and moderate Alzheimer’s who were taking rember experienced 81 per cent less mental decline compared with those on the placebo.
Those taking Rember did not experience any significant decline in their mental function over 19 months, while those on the placebo got worse.
The developer of this new drug is TauRx Therapeutics (note: They are rolling out a new site tomorrow, and connectivity is currently poor - you can find a cache of their website home page here at Google). It appears that the company was formed for the purpose of developing drugs that target the plaques or tangles that form in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, and it looks like they may have succeeded. (As a side note, apparently Rember may also be effective in treating Parkinson's as well - it is in clinical studies now).
An article on ChatterShmatter.com has these comments:
"These are the first very positive results I’ve seen" for stopping mental decline, said Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute on Aging. "It’s just fantastic."
In a small study of Alzheimer’s disease patients given the drug, it appeared to vastly improve their mental copacity when it came to thinking and memory.
"We’ve demonstrated for the first time we can halt the disease by a treatment that aims to dissolve the tangles," said Claude Wischik of the University of Aberdeen and chairman of TauRX Therapeutics in Singapore.
How big is this? Well, according to current epidemeology, more than 2% of all people over 80 will be affected by Alzheimer's each year - more than 4% if you are 85 or older, and more than 6% if you are 90 or older. This is a huge portion of the population to be affected - in the age group between 65–74 around 5% of the U.S. population had AD, increasing almost to 20% in the 75–84 group and to 50% afterwardsand to 50% afterwards
I, for one, hope that this pans out in larger clinical studies. Simply stopping the progression of this disease could save thousands of lives and tens of millions of dollars each year. Saving lives and money? Seems like a good idea to me
UPDATE: A BBC News article about this can be found here.