Too many people are not diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease early enough and go untreated, writes Gary W. Small, M.D. in an opinion piece on STAT.
A major hurdle is that primary care physicians often feel that their medical training did not properly prepare them to diagnose Alzheimer’s early on in the disease, which leads to missed diagnoses and delays in treatment, says Small, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
A delay in diagnosis means patients are not treated with medications that can slow down progression of the disease and that lost cognitive function cannot be regained, says Small, who along with other physicians and experts in the field spoke at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Toronto last week, urging an end to underdiagnosis and undertreatment of the disease.
Small says many people believe there is nothing that can be done to treat Alzheimer’s, but that is not the case. While there is no cure right now, medications can help people maintain their cognitive abilities and remain at higher levels of functioning longer, he says. Too often they are not prescribed, he said.
In the meantime, patients and families wait for a cure, but development of new drugs is long and arduous, he notes. In fact, there was disappointing news at last week’s conference about yet another drug. A new type of drug for Alzheimer’s disease failed to slow the rate of decline in its first large clinical trial, according to The New York Times. The drug, called LMTX, was the first which tried to undo the so-called tau tangles in the brain, but it did not slow decline in mental ability or daily functioning in patients when it was used as an add-on to existing medications. It did work, however, in a small subset of patients, where it was used as the only therapy.
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