Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
It was just 20 months ago that ABC News called the drug dimebon a “miracle for Alzheimer’s Disease.”
They weren’t alone in singing the drug’s praises after a preliminary trial. WebMD proclaimed, “Dimebon Shines as Alzheimer’s Therapy.”
Yesterday, MedPageToday.com reported, “Novel Alzheimer’s Drug Flops.” Excerpts of their story:
The investigational Alzheimer’s disease drug dimebon failed in the pivotal CONNECTION trial of patients with mild-to-moderate disease, the drug’s makers announced today. Latrepirdine did not result in significant gains on any of the five efficacy endpoints versus placebo after six months of treatment, according to Medivation and Pfizer, who have a partnership to develop the drug.
…
Peter Davies, PhD, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, said in an e-mail, “I am personally disappointed, but not surprised.”“The results from the (earlier widely reported) study were too good to be true.”
There’s a reason why words like “miracle…breakthrough…promising…hope” can be troublesome in medical research stories. This is another example.
(My thanks to Andrew Holtz for his inspiration on this post.)
Treatment for advanced ovarian tumors may lengthen survival, but questions still remain, despite the story’s emphasis on “promising” and “new hope.”
As with the HealthDay story on this research that we reviewed, readers of this story get a good dose of caveats and cautions along with the suggestions that electrical brain stimulation might someday “have implications” for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
The readers of this story and the other one we reviewed by Reuters are likely to understand that electrical brain stimulation could have some memory effects, but it’s a long way from becoming a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
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