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Few Alzheimer's treatments now and no cure ... yet
When a person is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the prognosis is not a good one.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved five drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s web site. The most commonly prescribed is donepezil, which is more commonly known as Aricept. The FDA approved the drug in 1996. More than 3.8 million people have taken the medicine, making it the number one prescribed Alzheimer’s drug in the world according to Aricept’s web site.
Aricept is taken once a day and is used to treat all stages of Alzheimer’s. It is a type of drug known as cholinesterase inhibitors, which the FDA approved to treat cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Memory, thinking, language, judgment and other thought processes are affected by cognitive symptoms. Rivastigmine, which is also called Exelon and galantamine, which is called Razadyne, are two drugs approved to treat mild to moderate Alzheimer’s.
Tacrine, also called Cognex, was the first cholinesterase inhibitor and was approved in 1993. The drug has a risk of liver damage as a side effect and is rarely prescribed today according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s web site. With the exception of Cognex, the other drugs approved by the FDA for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease have relatively minimal side effects.
While the cholinesterase inhibitors are the most popular drugs prescribed to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s, there is no cure for the disease. Aricept, Exelon and Razadyne are believed to delay or slow the worsening of symptoms in some people for six months to a year.
“Some people take them for six months or a year and if it seems to be helping, they continue,” Davis said. “If they don’t seem like they appear to be working, sometimes they just discontinue, especially if they continue to deteriorate on the medications.”
Another drug, Namenda, which was approved by the FDA in 2003, can be taken with Aricept, Exelon or Razadyne to help treat the disease. While results from the medications are varied, Davis said improvement in some patients might not be because of the drug they are taking.
“Some people progress at different rates,” he said. “Some people stabilize. I don’t think it’s necessarily related to the medication that we use.”