RESEARCHERS from Yorkshire claim drugs for Alzheimer's disease should be made more widely available.
Only patients with moderately severe forms of the illness can access latest drugs known as cholinesterase inhibitors following a controversial ruling by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice).
It means many patients with early sympt
oms, including the author Terry Pratchett, are paying for their own treatment because their condition is not severe enough to warrant NHS-funded treatment.
Now a study by experts from the clinical neuroscience centre at Hull University,, published yesterday, appears to show people with early-stage disease can also have an "excellent" response to treatment.
A total of 26 patients with early-stage Alzheimer's attended the university's memory clinic over a five-month period and were given the drugs.
Typical early symptoms of the disease are deterioration in linguistic skills and loss of recent and working memory; the group was tested using word association and working memory tests which are not normally used when assessing patients.
Their brain activity was assessed at the beginning and end of the treatment.
Prof Annalena Venneri, who headed the research, said: "We tested the patients' semantic association by giving them a word and then a choice of two other words, they had to decide which ones were linked. In order to test their working memory, we showed them letters running across a screen and they had to press a button when the same letter was shown twice."
They found nine out of 26 patients responded well to treatment and regained normal levels of activity in brain areas used by healthy people when doing the tasks.
