Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
The article by Gustavsson et al 1 addresses the important question how to handle new medications with focus on drug candidates that reduce Aβ or tau in the brain, for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), where the need for a disease-modifying drug is enormous.
There are several ethical issues to deal with. The challenges and ethical implications associated with whom should be eligible for treatment are thoroughly discussed in the article. Should treatment only be available to those with mild symptoms and/or to those with no symptoms but with risk for AD? Where do we draw the line between who will be eligible for treatment and who will not? Who will be responsible for the prioritisation?
There are many ethical problems with both population screening and screening of those with high risk well discussed in the article. Indeed, the first immunotherapy drug Aducanumab was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)in …
Footnotes
Funding There is no specific grant for this commentary from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- The China Alzheimer Report 2022
- FDA’s dilemma with the aducanumab approval: public pressure and hope, surrogate markers and efficacy, and possible next steps
- Selecting the target population for new Alzheimer drugs: challenges and expectations
- Cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease: clinical management and prevention
- MRI and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers for predicting progression to Alzheimer's disease in patients with mild cognitive impairment: a diagnostic accuracy study
- How many patients are eligible for disease-modifying treatment in Alzheimer’s disease? A French national observational study over 5 years
- Novel drug candidates targeting Alzheimer’s disease: ethical challenges with identifying the relevant patient population
- Safety and efficacy of plasma transfusion from exercise-trained donors in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease: protocol for the ExPlas study
- On the personal utility of Alzheimer’s disease-related biomarker testing in the research context
- Blood-based high sensitivity measurements of beta-amyloid and phosphorylated tau as biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease: a focused review on recent advances