Treatment of Alzheimer’s patients, in the UK, has been criticised in a damning report by the National Audit Office (NAO) and also by the Alzheimer’s Research Trust. The NAO said the UK lags behind other EU countries in terms of early diagnosis and access to drugs, and added that the disease is being given “too low a priority by health and social services”. It found that UK performance is in the bottom third of Europe, below almost all northern and western European nations.
Although the Department of Health says that early diagnosis and intervention in dementia is cost-effective, NAO has highlighted a significant diagnosis gap, with less than a third of people with the disease ever receiving a formal diagnosis.
Rebecca Wood, CEO of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, told the Clinical Services Journal: “One of the problems has been that clinicians have been slow in recognising dementia as a true disease. The attitude has been ‘what do you expect at your age?’ It hasn’t been viewed as an illness worth diagnosing, that you can do something about.”
The research trust also criticised the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which ruled that drugs for the disease should only be prescribed to those in the moderate stage. The drugs under the spotlight cost about £2.50 per patient per day.
NICE decided that these drugs should only be prescribed to patients with moderate-stage Alzheimer's, on the basis that they do not have sufficient effect to justify the expense of prescribing them for all patients, including those with milder symptoms. A judicial review recently ruled in favour of NICE, following a legal challenge to the decision.
Harriet Millward, Deputy Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, said: “We are devastated that these drugs will remain unavailable on the NHS to people with early-stage Alzheimer’s when they might benefit from them. We urgently need to do more research to find better treatments, but research is currently hugely underfunded – we are scraping for every penny to find vital work.”
