48 RESULTS
COMMENT This Swedish nursing home trial demonstrates the practical utility of donepezil in severely impaired Alzheimer patients and provides support for its use. It shows that more patients with severe illness actually improve their cognitive functioning and to a
COMMENT From a scientific perspective, it is desirable to be able to predict who develops dementia and when. It’s even better to be able to prevent it. Niels Bohr cautioned, however, that “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future.” Kivipelto and col
COMMENT This news story is a bit too optimistic and accepting of the company line. In truth, Neurochem managers knew in early April that their trial was negative and gave away as much in their April 19 press release by discussing the need for post hoc statistical
COMMENT Reader advisory: These comments may appeal only to readers of a certain age, who remember black-and-white TV and Richard Nixon. Sean Silcoff, a reporter for Neurochem’s hometown paper, The Toronto Financial Post, describes the Alzhemed story as playing ou
COMMENT A systematic review collects all relevant studies on a subject, integrates findings, and allows readers to do their own assessments based on all available evidence. Inferences from systematic reviews stand in sharp contrast to picking and choosing individ
COMMENT The media have been tripping over themselves about a single case report of what they have pegged as etanercept’s Lazarus-like effect in one patient. To add but one headline to the ones cited as examples in Gabrielle Strobel’s news story, the Methuselah Fo
COMMENT Suppose you have a registry or cohort of volunteers on whom you are gathering longitudinal data and can hence characterize their recent past history, and suppose you do so with ratings that are used in prevention trials. Then you have a cohort that you ca
COMMENT Semagacestat continues the streak of late-phase trial failures. All failed for lack of efficacy, but as enzyme inhibitors and antibodies are advanced, serious toxicity in the trials may become more frequent as well. Sequential failures discovered late in
COMMENT The topline results of the Phase 3, bapineuzumab trial 302 are disappointing but not surprising. That is mainly because the prior Phase 2, 201 trial was a multiple ascending dose trial, not planned as an efficacy trial, and didn’t show reliable efficacy e
COMMENT Antipsychotic medications include haloperidol, thiothixine, trifluoperazine, perphenazine, thioridazine, and then the newer antipsychotics, clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine, ziprasidone, and aripiprazole. The latter are called “atypical” or
COMMENT This report also indirectly illustrates the complexities of using individual putative biomarkers in clinical trials, either to characterize disease severity or as a surrogate outcome measure, without interpreting the marker within the context of the demog
COMMENT This work adds to the therapeutic rationale for the standardized ginkgo biloba extract EGb 761—sold as a dietary food supplement in the U.S.—or some of its components as potential treatments for Alzheimer disease. APP transgenic mice were fed 300 mG/kG do
COMMENT Unfortunately, it is now evident that the doses of tarenflurbil used in the large Phase 3 clinical trials (800 mg b.i.d.) were associated with the typical adverse events of NSAIDs—albeit at a lower rate than with over-the-counter and prescription NSAIDs—a
COMMENT This important report further elaborates the estrogen replacement therapy-associated increased risk for dementia in women over 65. These women tend to have had somewhat lower than expected cognitive function although not dementia and might very well have
COMMENT Metrifonate is a prodrug hydrolyzed to dichlorvos, an irreversibly binding cholinesterase inhibitor. It completed Phase 3 trials in AD with statistically significant efficacy similar to other cholinesterase inhibitors and sufficient that it would have bee
