The sad truth about all those Alzheimer’s drugs

Big Pharma’s heartless Alzheimer’s deception
It’s one of the cruelest tricks Big Pharma has played: pretending that the prescription drugs on the market for Alzheimer’s will slow down the disease.

Or will allow us to make a connection again with a loved one we see slipping away from us.

But the sad truth is, they don’t.

The commercials and ads paint a pretty picture to lure us into thinking these drugs offer hope. I mean, when you see all those moms and dads who appear to have been helped, it certainly seems like they work.

But the real picture shows just the opposite.

And unless you read all that fine print, and then mine FDA documents and drug reviews, it would be impossible to learn the truth.

But a husband and wife team of researchers from Dartmouth University has deciphered all that information.

And what they found is a shocking story of deceit and misrepresentation — and heartbreak.

Just the facts

Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz think that if you look at a box of cereal and can learn more about it than a drug you’re taking, something is very, very wrong.

To try and fix this information underload, they co-founded a company called Informulary. And some of the first drugs they set out to investigate are for Alzheimer’s.

Consumer Reports commissioned Informulary to review the three FDA drugs approved to treat Alzheimer’s — Aricept, Razadyne and the Exelon patch.

And the sad truth is that the results it found are nothing like what’s shown in those ads.

The best the pair could say about them is that they have “limited benefit” in helping patients.

The “Drug Facts” box they created also states that these drugs have “never shown to improve quality of life, independent function or reduce institutionalization.”

And…not one of them can stop or reverse the terrifying course of this disease.

Now you might say that any chance of help, even if it’s “limited” is worth a try. And that might be true of these drugs if they didn’t come with some really awful side effects — like nausea, diarrhea, muscle cramps and loss of appetite.

And for a frail, older person, those kinds of side effects can amount to a death sentence. If that wasn’t bad enough, they can also cause life-threatening internal bleeding and a slowing of the heart rate.

Drs. Woloshin and Schwartz are hoping to convince the FDA that easy-to-understand information is needed by both patients and doctors.

But so far they haven’t had much luck.

So they’re working to get these facts out to people any way they can.

“The prescribing info is written by industry, and then negotiated with the FDA,” said Dr. Schwartz. “And we have documented examples where important info — like how well the drug works — is not in the label.”

They said their hope for the Drug Facts box is that it will help people learn if a drug is “effective” and also “discourage people from taking drugs that don’t work or are just harmful.”

The pair thinks there’s no reason that kind of information can’t be as clear as a baseball game score.

You wouldn’t hear a sports report saying a team “won, hopefully won, by a bit” Dr. Schwartz said, “You’d give the score.”

To read the “score” on these Alzheimer’s drugs, click here.

Sources:
“How well does a drug work? Look beyond the fine print” NPR, July 25, 2014, npr.org