Why is this man smiling?
If you’ve ever lived with someone suffering from the horrible effects of Alzheimer’s, you know that you’d do almost anything to stop this disease in its tracks. If you’ve been spared that experience, take a look at Nancy Reagan’s face at her husband’s funeral. That’s the look of somebody who has acted as caretaker for a man who was at one time the most powerful person in the free world, and then, not such a long time later, wasn’t entirely sure where, or who, he was.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the drugs that promise to effectively treat this disease actually worked?
As a doctor familiar with Alzheimer’s and its effects on families, I’m sad to say that they don’t. At least not very well. The drugs we have, though widely advertised, are little more effective than placebo, and for this reason some doctors no longer prescribe them. In fact, in a recent independently funded study, Dr. Richard Grey concluded Aricept, the most popular drug in the class of Alzheimer’s treatments, was “worthless.”
Why don’t Alzheimer’s drugs work?
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