A new online service designed to provide Alzheimer’s patients to clinical trials can help solve a great bottleneck in the development of new medicines: the lack of people who try them, said a group of researchers, the 12 July 2010. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that launched more than 100 clinical trials of medicines for Alzheimer’s and dementia, and dozens of more experimental substances that soon will be ready to test. But there are very few people who accept to undergo trials. We will need more than 10,000 patients of Alzheimer’s during the next five years to join the tests that are already planned, said Dr. Reisa Sperling of the Brigham and Women s Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in an interview at the meeting of the Alzheimer’s Association in Honolulu. Sperling said that pharmacological companies take between one and two years to gather enough patients median and elderly for clinical trials.

If it takes 18 months to recruitment and the tests take another 18 months, this means three years for each medication, he said. That is simply too long. That means that at this pace, we will not be able to prove all the substances until 2030 when there will be three times as many people with Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that from 2010 to 2050, the cost of caring for persons of 65 or more years with Alzheimer’s in U.S. will increase more than six times until the 1.08 billion dollars a year. Current medicines help deal with the symptoms but treatment can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, which can start with a slight confusion and memory loss before progressing way to disability and death. Many medical centers and pharmaceutical companies and universities around the world are trying to develop therapies that modify the disease, said Dr. Ronald Petersen of the Mayo in Rochester, Minnesota clinic. The biggest obstacle is the recruitment of an adequate number of subjects, he said at a Conference of Press. Continue reading By Leonel Morales.