Health Story

05 July 2009 01:46 BST

Drug 'reverses' Alzheimer's

Patients suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease can prevent and even reverse the deterioration of their brain's cognitive functions by taking a drug called donepezil.

As a team of Swedish scientists showed, donopezil – which is usually used to treat milder cases of the degenerative Alzheimer's disease – improves the ability of sufferers to carry out daily activities.

Between October 2002 and October 2004 194 patients living in care homes took part in the Karolinska Institute's study, with half taking placebos for six months and half taking the donopezil drug.

Results of the tests were similar to those for a more established Alzheimer's drug, memantine, whose methodology the scientists followed.

"Donepezil slows, and can reverse some aspects of deterioration of cognition and function in individuals with severe Alzheimer's who live in nursing homes," said Professor Bengt Winblad, who led the research.

"If treatment can help patients in the late phase of dementia, without necessarily increasing the length of time they have severe Alzheimer’s disease, then this is a treatment option that should be available."

Professor Winblad's report, which will be published in the Lancet, qualified its findings by acknowledging that some of the improved scores patients showed may have been caused by a combination of donopezil with other medications being taken.

It suggested that "analyses of subsets of patients needs to be done… to explore these possibilities".

There are 400,000 Alzheimer's sufferers in the UK alone, one in five having the disease in its severe state.