Long, slow fight against Alzheimer’s could use some help

People affected by Alzheimer’s disease hope every day that a treatment for this horrific malady will be discovered.

Often, those caring for a loved one with dementia grasp at any straw they can find — a new treatment they read about on Facebook, a tweet they see about a cure, false reports of natural remedies that will prevent Alzheimer’s.

Desperation drives this understandable behavior, and there are many false prophets.

As someone who has worked with patients and researched Alzheimer’s for more than 35 years, I know the truth. There currently is no preventative, powerful treatment or cure for this disease.

It takes time to find treatments for any disease, but research into Alzheimer’s and other dementias takes an especially long time. This disease moves very slowly. There are no shortcuts in Alzheimer’s research.

Why so long?

To show that a medication works to slow the decline in people with mild Alzheimer’s disease, for example, half of the trial patients receive the new medication and the other half a placebo, or inactive compound (sometimes it is two-thirds who receive the drug, one-third receive the placebo).

If the drug works, over time the group on the drug slows down its decline. These people eventually reach a point where they are significantly less impaired than patients on the inactive substance.

This is how we prove drugs work and, assuming they are safe, the data can go to the Food and Drug Administration for approval to market it.

The time factor depends on how much a drug can slow down the rate of change in the brain.

For something that stops the disease in its tracks, you might know in six months or a year.

If you have something that is less powerful, the study will need more people and a longer trial. This results in a year-and-a-half to two-year trial, plus a year to enroll people, and then several months to gather all the data, do the statistics and see if the drug really worked.

Prevention trials take even longer.

The good news is that we have learned an enormous amount about the disease over the last 25 years, enough to know the kinds of interventions that we should try to slow the disease or prevent it.

Some of those trials are underway. More than 100 compounds are at various levels of development in laboratories, in safety trials, in proof-of-concept trials, or even in the last kind of trial, where, if it works and is safe, the FDA will approve it for use.

The Alzheimer’s Association hosts an annual international conference during which investigators, clinicians and care providers from across the world gather to share the latest study results, theories and discoveries that will help bring the world closer to breakthroughs in dementia science.

We all are working together for a world without Alzheimer’s disease.

And we need the public’s help. You do not have to be sick to participate in a clinical trial — we need healthy people to be compared to people with dementia, and some trials are testing treatments for prevention of Alzheimer’s disease in normal people.

The Alzheimer’s Association also offers TrialMatch, a free clinical studies matching service that connects individuals with Alzheimer’s, caregivers and healthy volunteers to current studies.

We know we are in a race to find an effective treatment. Once we do, we will shout it from the mountain tops and people will not have to grasp at straws anymore.

This story was originally published February 10, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Long, slow fight against Alzheimer’s could use some help."