- In the past year, federal regulators have approved two new monoclonal antibody treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
- However, researchers report that only a small percentage of people in the early stages of the disease are eligible to be prescribed the two drugs.
- Experts say it’s important to treat people with dementia as early as possible, so the lack of eligibility is a serious issue.
Only a small percentage of people with early stage Alzheimer’s disease are eligible for treatment using new monoclonal antibody drugs.
That’s according to research published today in the journal Neurology.
In their study, researchers report that because such a small number of people qualified for clinical trials of the drugs, only a small number of people meet the criteria for treatment with drugs such as aducanumab and lecanemab.
“There is hope that these new therapies for Alzheimer’s may slow progression of the disease for many people, although the fact remains that the drugs have only been studied in people with the earliest forms of the disease,” Maria Vassilaki, PhD, an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and author of the study, said in a press statement.
“The inclusion and exclusion criteria of the clinical trials that led to FDA accelerated approval of these therapies form the basis of how people should be invited or discouraged from receiving one of these drugs. Our study estimates that only a small percentage of older people with early cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s may be eligible to be treated with monoclonal antibodies for amyloid-ß in the brain,” she added.
The researchers examined 237 people between the ages of 50 to 90 who were experiencing mild dementia or cognitive impairment.
The subjects also had increased amounts of amyloid-ß plaques on brain scans.
The researchers then assessed these people against the inclusion and exclusion criteria for monoclonal antibody drugs lecanemab and aducanumab.
While the researchers found…
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