I wanted to raise the issue because I wanted to have a broad view on all of the topics which are related to anti-amyloid medication. So first of all, a lot of people don’t really yet understand that there are new disease-modifying therapies that are coming onto the market. Some of those, of course, are anti amyloid-medications and their cost has proven to be very high. In my community, a lot of people are concerned because of these high costs, it will imply that there will not be a reimbursement of those costs to people that could potentially benefit from it...
I wanted to raise the issue because I wanted to have a broad view on all of the topics which are related to anti-amyloid medication. So first of all, a lot of people don’t really yet understand that there are new disease-modifying therapies that are coming onto the market. Some of those, of course, are anti amyloid-medications and their cost has proven to be very high. In my community, a lot of people are concerned because of these high costs, it will imply that there will not be a reimbursement of those costs to people that could potentially benefit from it.
But even before talking about that, you really need to start having a look at the capacity of countries, not just lower income countries but also high-income countries, to even diagnose people properly. Because a lot of these medications are not suitable for certain categories of people, they are only suitable for quite a small amount of people. And to have the capacity to diagnose is currently a big challenge. A lot of health care systems (we spend a lot of our life looking at health care system nationally) are just simply not geared up to do that. I wanted to emphasize, for example, issues like the amount of clinicians that are even available to do those diagnoses, the amount of instruments, and diagnostic instruments in particular, that are available to do those diagnoses.
But ultimately, I also wanted to emphasize as well as the level of non-preparedness of government, the fact that there is still a great lack in the medical profession of people who are trained to even recognize dementia as a disease. When we did a survey in 2019, 62% of medical professionals, and we surveyed the 70,000 people all across the globe, although not all of them were medical professionals, but 62% of all respondents say that they did not believe that dementia was a disease. So, to an audience like your journal, that will come like an incredible thing to hear. But the reality is that it’s not just the general public that doesn’t know what is dementia and therefore the stigma associated to that, but it’s even the medical professional.
