Despite Its Modest Goals, Promising Alzheimer’s Drug Is Latest In Long String Of Failures To Combat Disease
The failure may mark the unraveling of an approach to Alzheimer's treatment that has held hope: increasing the supply of the brain chemical serotonin in patients.
Los Angeles Times:
One Of The Most Promising Drugs For Alzheimer's Disease Fails In Clinical Trials
To the roughly 400 clinical trials that have tested some experimental treatment for Alzheimer's disease and come up short, we can now add three more. An experimental drug called idalopirdine failed to help people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease in a trio of trials that involved 2,525 patients in 34 countries. Not only did the drug fail to bring about any meaningful change in cognitive tests that are widely used in diagnosing and tracking the progress of the disease, it also failed to cause significant improvements in general measures of daily function among those taking it at any of three tested doses. (Healy, 1/9)