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The importance of high quality trials of cognitive interventions in Alzheimer's disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2016

Jonathan Huntley  and
Robert Howard
Jonathan Huntley
Affiliation:
Department of Old Age Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK
Robert Howard*
Affiliation:
Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, UK
*
Email: robert.howard@ucl.ac.uk
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Extract

Currently available treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD) are disappointing and their modest benefits do not reflect the increased understanding of the condition that has arisen from the last 50 years of research or the huge investments made by the pharmaceutical industry and academia in developing therapies. Cholinesterase inhibitors and memantine are evidence-based symptomatic treatments that offer benefits at the margins of clinical significance, but successive failures in trials of putative disease-modifying drugs have led researchers to investigate the potential efficacy of non-drug interventions. Exercise and cognitive-based interventions have received the most attention, but we are still a long way from understanding whether any can offer real benefit to patients with AD (Huntley et al., 2015).

Type
Commentary paper of the month
Information
International Psychogeriatrics , Volume 28 , Issue 5 , May 2016 , pp. 705 - 706
Copyright
Copyright © International Psychogeriatric Association 2016 

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References

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