by Anne Underwood
William Bayse, a former NASA engineer, had an awesome memory
- at least until he started showing signs of Alzheimer’s six years ago. By last spring, Bayse, then 64, barely responded to his four children. Then he got into a trial for an experimental pill - the first of a possible new class of Alzheimer’s drugs - which he was told to take with his regular pills for dementia. “In four months he was joking with the kids,” says his ex-wife Harriette. (He regressed after six good months.) That drug, memantine, moved a step closer to market last week, when The New England Journal of Medicine published a major study showing that it helped slow (but not halt) cognitive and functional declines in 126 patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s, versus 126 on placebo. “It’s the first treatment for advanced stages of the disease,” says lead author Barry Reisberg, professor of psychiatry at New York University. The drug helped patients continue basic activities like dressing and bathing themselves.
In a second study, presented last week at the American Academy of Neurology, memantine combined with a standard Alzheimer’s drug (Aricept) actually improved patients’ cognitive abilities somewhat - at least for the six month trial. Benefits were starting to diminish by the end. Is memantine a cure? No. But it could be patients’ best hope so far.
www.newsweek.com
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