STAT+: Getting Alzheimer’s treatment to those who need it poses particular challenges
A host of hurdles are slowing the adoption of the new Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi, experts involved in the treatment of patients said Wednesday, from complicated logistics to the fact that many people don’t recognize that their memory loss is a disease soon enough.
Some patients still grapple with whether they want to be diagnosed, even though a treatment exists, the experts said, speaking during a STAT virtual event.
“Even the word for dementia does not always exist in every culture and in every language,” said Hollis Day, chief of geriatrics at Boston Medical Center and a professor at Boston University’s medical school. “And so just getting people to accept that memory loss is not normal aging necessarily, is a big barrier to getting people into diagnosis early enough to benefit from these treatments.”
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