Only a small percentage of people are candidates for monoclonal antibodies to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Monoclonal antibodies for Alzheimer’s disease, like the drug called Aduhelm, attach to aberrant proteins thought to be one cause of the disease, but they only stand to benefit a small number of the people who might be at risk. That’s according to Lolita Nidadavolu, a geriatrics expert at Johns Hopkins.

Nidadavolu: Ten percent of all their population that had mild cognitive impairment, so one of the criteria for Aduhelm, they only had a fraction of them qualify for it. It's very inaccessible in the sense of the many comorbidities that are there for patients who would really want to take it, certainly people that have heart conditions would be one of the exclusion criteria. The bleeding side effects a major one and you're really trading one risk for another in those cases.  :24

Nidadavolu says a new study reporting a novel way of getting these drugs into the brain may benefit even fewer people, since people who have other medical conditions or are otherwise frail may not be able to tolerate this additional step. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.