HEALTH
New hope for Alzheimer's
Recent advances and promising new drugs mean doctors may soon be able to stave off the worst effects of the disease
For years, alzheimer’s conferences were like the obituary pages in the local newspaper: It’s where clinicians and researchers in the field went to find out the names of the latest promising drugs to die. Between 1998 and 2017 alone, 146 clinical trials of new Alzheimer’s drugs failed.
So when Randall Bateman showed up outside a restaurant in Bar Harbor, Maine, one evening in the fall of 2022 during an industry confab and announced to a couple of tables full of his colleagues drinking on the patio that he had something important to share with them, no one was prepared for what came next.
Bateman, a neurologist and Alzheimer’s researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told them he had just received a phone call from his contact at the drug company running the trials of lecanemab, an experimental drug designed to facilitate the removal of the toxic plaques in the brain associated with the disease. The results, set for public release the following morning, were in: In a study of 1,800 Alzheimer’s patients over 18 months, the treatment had reduced the rate of cognitive decline by close to 30 percent.
There was a stunned silence and some skeptical questions. Then the table erupted in applause.
“It’s all anybody talked about for the rest of the meeting,” says Bateman. “The agenda was blown. Nobody was paying attention to what we should have been doing. It’s reenergized, recharged, everything.”
The trial results Bateman reported was just the first in a flurry of positive developments. A few months later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, now marketed as Leqembi. In July, Eli Lilly reported that a second drug, donanemab, had an even greater effect on slowing the progress of the disease, in a study of more than 1,700 Alzheimer’s patients. The FDA is expected to approve it soon. As with Leqembi, many expect that Medicare will eventually agree to pay for it—marking the first time new treatments have become available for the terminal neurodegenerative disease in 20 years.
To be sure, these drugs are not cures. They offer little relief for patients already in the late stages of Alzheimer’s dementia, for whom the effects of the new drugs are modest. They can slow the decline, giving those in whom the disease is moderately advanced an extra year of cognitive lucidity. For those patients and their families that’s certain
