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    Wednesday, April 13, 2005

    Delaying Dementia: The headlines say that the drug Aricept delays Alzheimer's disease, but the story says otherwise:

    For their study, Petersen and colleagues enrolled 769 people with an average age of 73 and mild cognitive impairment — which can progress to the severe memory loss that marks Alzheimer's.

    They gave them daily doses of vitamin E or donepezil or a placebo for three years.

    After three years, 212 of the volunteers were diagnosed with possible or probable Alzheimer's disease.

    .....Although after three years, the rate of progression to Alzheimer's disease was not lower among patients treated with donepezil than among those given placebo, donepezil therapy was associated with a lower rate of progression to Alzheimer's disease during the first 12 months of treatment.


    Guess it only pays to take it for a year. Or maybe not. The full study is here in PDF form. The margin of error for the measurements of cognitive function are so large that the groups - placebo, vitamin E, and Aricept, overlap significantly no matter what test of intellectual functioning they used. Probably not worth the $130 a month price tag.


     

    posted by Sydney on 4/13/2005 09:07:00 PM 0 comments

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