Sun Oct 8, 07:21 News
‘Eej, did you see that on television? They have something against dementia!’ I often hear such comments after a broadcast on this subject. The epidemiologist Jan Willem van Dalen wrote a good piece about it in the Volkskrant. He begins: ‘While everything is being done to make the self-reliance of the elderly more difficult, scientists are fueling the hope that the increase in the number of people with dementia can be stopped with medication. Forget it.’
Pharmaceutical companies and scientific researchers are doing their utmost to spread the belief that there will be a solution for dementia, and an easy one at that. There is now a breakthrough: according to some scientists, Lecanemab would slow down the decline in dementia; other researchers contradict this. A large-scale study about this has been published in one of the best medical journals. The study involved people with early dementia. How demented someone was was measured with a questionnaire: if you score 0 points you have no dementia, if you score 18 points you have severe dementia. The participants in the study scored an average of 3 points, meaning mild dementia (probably so mild that you wouldn’t go to the doctor with it). After 18 months of using lecanemab, the score of patients had risen to 4.21, and of patients taking a fake drug to 4.66. Both groups had deteriorated slightly, but the people who received a fake drug had deteriorated slightly more. I think it is a very poor result. What should the future patient do for it? As an older person, you must first have a test with a questionnaire done. If you score between 0.5 and 6 – and therefore have early dementia – you will receive an infusion every two weeks. This costs 25,000 euros per patient per year. What does that mean for the whole of the Netherlands? Van Dalen writes the following about this: ‘There are 3 million people over the age of 65 in the Netherlands. Of these, 1.2 million will develop dementia at some point. Suppose we detect them with a perfect test and treat them preventively at 25,000 euros per year, that would cost 30 billion euros annually; a third of the healthcare budget.’ That seems impossible to me.
Of course, research needs to be done into the nasty disease called dementia. There is a great need for that. But we must remain critical of researchers and the pharmaceutical industry. They have far too much interest in presenting things as positively as possible, because a lot of money is involved.
Peter Lucassen
Former GP Bakel
2023-10-08 05:21:00
#Dementia
