Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a very common disorder as it affects approximately 50 million people worldwide. It is one of the top five causes of death and needs proper treatment. But there are very few treatments available to treat this disease. But a new study from Chapman University discovered that a combination of two prominent Alzheimer’s drugs, Donepezil and Memantine effectively reduces symptoms of this disease. It has the potential to save the lives of around 303,000 Americans by more than five years following an AD diagnosis. It was a huge and well conducted research on Alzheimer’s disease.
This study was just recently published in Communications Medicine. This study examined the medical data of 12,744 Alzheimer’s patients. These patients were taking the three most popular medications: donepezil (28.94%), memantine (10.7%) or a combination of the two (9.11%). Half of these people (45.54%) did not receive any therapy at all. Then researchers tracked the results of these patients five years later.
When researchers evaluated the collected data, they observed that those who did not get any therapy died at a higher rate than those who had the combination treatment. People who just took Donepezil or Memantine had a higher mortality rate (42% vs. 32%). They used advanced statistical approaches to get accurate and unbiased treatment outcomes. They also found that combining donepezil and memantine increased survival rates by 0.05, or 6.4%.
This study found that a combination of Donepezil and Memantine is the best effective therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. Along with boosting the chance of surviving for 5 years after diagnosis, this combination dramatically reduced the risk of death. According to one of the experts, this study demonstrates that the combination of Donepezil and Memantine drug is a very effective treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease. People with this condition should be advised this combination by their doctors. This will save many lives.
Reference Link:
Ehsan Yaghmaei et al, Combined use of Donepezil and Memantine increases the probability of five-year survival of Alzheimer’s disease patients, Communications Medicine (2024).
