What else could possibly be worse than losing your mind, including your memory and ability to understand your position in space and time? Alzheimer’s disease does just that, and it sometimes leads to the patient’s death. The horrible degenerative brain disease destroys nerve connections in the brain, making it more and more difficult forthe patient to do regular things like swallowing and moving around.
Therefore, it would be nice if humanity will learn more about how to deal with the most common form of dementia. While there is no obvious cure for the illness, nor a drug to stop or slow its progression, there are known drugs that could help treat the symptoms. But still, there could be another chance to fight Alzheimer’s disease.
The experimental intravenous drug donanemab could be the key
CNN writes that Eli Lilly and Company’s experimental intravenous drug donanemab shows signs of slowing the cognitive decline for Alzheimer’s patients after using data from the Integrated Alzheimer’s Disease Rating Scale.
The study focused on 257 patients who were suffering from early symptomatic Alzheimer’s. One hundred thirty-one of them received the donanemab drug, and 126 received a placebo. The conclusion was that donanemab slowed down the decline of cognition for Alzheimer’s patients by 32% over the span of 76 weeks, compared to the ill people who were given a placebo.
Maria Carrillo, the chief science officer at the Alzheimer’s Association, declared:
Out of 18 months, in comparison to the people that did not get the drug, these folks were declining six months slower.
Carrillo also added:
That’s six more months of better cognition, better memories, better enjoyable times with your family.
Although the results are early, they are indeed promising. Carrillo explained:
It could be a first step towards slowing more significantly, or stopping, cognitive decline in these earlier stages, which would really be transformational for our field.
The early clinical trial results that reveal the promising data about donanemab were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
