A new drug developed to treat Alzheimer’s disease is said to be close to being officially approved for use in the UK.
Lecanemab, made by Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai, slows progression of the early stages of the disease and is undergoing pre-approval evaluation by drug regulators.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is expected to approve the drug for use in treating the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, meaning it will be available for private prescription in the UK.
The drug, approved for use in the United States last year and sold under the name Leqembi, works by removing sticky brain proteins called amyloid, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.
But some experts Some patients Side effects such as brain swelling and cerebral hemorrhage may occur.
The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence will advise the MHRA on whether lecanemab should also be made available through the NHS.
The MHRA said: “We are currently completing a rigorous evaluation of the evidence supporting the effectiveness of lecanemab in treating Alzheimer’s disease and will provide further information in due course.”
More than half of the patients who started treatment early still showed improvement after taking the medication for three years.
Alamy
Pharmaceutical company Eisai and biotechnology company Biogen, which have collaborated on developing lecanemab, reported that early new clinical data shows that more than 50 percent of patients who start the treatment at an early stage of Alzheimer’s disease continue to improve after three years of treatment.
The study results also suggest that Alzheimer’s disease continues to progress even if treatment is stopped, indicating that patients would continue to benefit from continuing to take lecanemab.
“There’s no doubt this is the greatest advance in the last 30 years,” said John Hardy, professor of molecular biology of neurological diseases at the Institute of Neurology, University of London.
But researchers at the University of Cambridge warned this month that new drugs developed to tackle Alzheimer’s, such as lecanemab, “do not provide a large-scale solution to dementia risk.” The “small” effects of the drugs on the disease may not outweigh the risks of taking them, they wrote in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
Lead author Dr Sebastian Walsh, a public health medicine postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge Public Health, said: “If approved, the drug is likely to only be relevant to a relatively small proportion of Alzheimer’s patients, so potential beneficiaries will need to undergo a range of assessments before they can access it.”
“Moreover, the effects seen in clinical trials are very small and the drug needs to be given as early as possible, when symptoms are mild, and it can be difficult to identify people at this stage of the disease.”
The number of people living with dementia in the UK is expected to rise to 1.4 million by 2040.
Yui Mok/PA
According to the Alzheimer’s Society, there are an estimated 982,000 people living with dementia in the UK, and this number is expected to rise to 1.4 million by 2040.
Researchers identified two new risks – high cholesterol and poor eyesight – that, if addressed, could reduce the chances of developing dementia. According to The Lancet’s Third Commission on Dementia Prevention and Interventions, high cholesterol and poor eyesight are associated with 9% of all dementia cases.
To reduce the lifetime risk of dementia, the committee made 13 recommendations to governments and individuals, including providing hearing aids to everyone with hearing loss, reducing exposure to harmful noise, and detecting and treating high cholesterol from around age 40.
