We report our clinical experience with a community population of patients with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia. And we have set up an institutional review committee to review each patient that was referred for lecanemab therapy. And with unanimous approval, each of the patients began therapy and we tracked outcomes over the first nine months. And what we found is that, one, the rate of cognitive decline is slow and consistent with what was published in the CLARITY-AD trial...
We report our clinical experience with a community population of patients with mild cognitive impairment and early-stage Alzheimer’s dementia. And we have set up an institutional review committee to review each patient that was referred for lecanemab therapy. And with unanimous approval, each of the patients began therapy and we tracked outcomes over the first nine months. And what we found is that, one, the rate of cognitive decline is slow and consistent with what was published in the CLARITY-AD trial. We also find that in some patients there appears to be a benefit in the first six months where their symptoms were actually improving rather than declining, as one would expect. And then lastly, we did not have any serious complications. So we did have ARIA-E and ARIA-H in some of our patients, but it was not really correlated with the APOE genotype that they had, nor, like I said, did we have any deaths or serious complications. The abstract only looks at the lecanemab-treated patients because during the time frame that we were discussing, we had not started the donanemab treatment yet for our patients. So I think that this is a very exciting time for patients. In the past, there was no incentive really to be diagnosed early, whereas with these new medications, we now know that treating during the earlier phases, meaning mild cognitive impairment, the outcomes are better than if you even treat during the early Alzheimer’s phase simply because what you’re trying to do is to preserve cognitive abilities for each patient. What we know is that if you treat while there are Mini Mental Status examination scores are higher, meaning that they’re in the mild cognitive impairment phase rather than even the early Alzheimer’s disease phase, the potential outcomes are improved. When we looked at published papers, it’s obvious that the cognitive decline is slowed by either donanemab or lecanemab. However, what’s not really highlighted is that there’s a certain percentage of patients in these two clinical trials where the degree of cognitive decline essentially went to zero. So they did not worsen over this 18-month period. And so currently we cannot predict who’s going to be in that population where people get no worse during this 18-month treatment period. So presumably by slowing it down during this 18 months, you’re buying people further time down the road where the cognitive decline is slowed. But also there’s a potential, right, if you’ve turned their cognitive decline from whatever it would have been to zero, further decline, that you might even be able to continue treating them and keeping them at that level for a longer period of time.
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