5 New Neurology Studies to Know

COMMENTARY

5 New Neurology Studies to Know

Hans-Christoph Diener, MD, PhD

Disclosures

May 23, 2019

2

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Dear colleagues, I am Christoph Diener, a neurologist from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. In April, I identified five interesting studies in neurology. Let me start with Alzheimer's disease.

There is a class of drugs that has an impact on the production of amyloid beta. One of these drugs is verubecestat, which is an oral, beta-site amyloid precursor protein-cleaving enzyme 1 inhibitor. [Verubecestat inhibits the production of beta amyloid and can be given orally.]

Verubecestat was tested in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1455 patients with memory impairment and elevated brain amyloid on PET.[1] The purpose was to look at incipient Alzheimer's disease because this drug failed in patients who already had moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease.

The investigators used two doses of 12 or 40 mg daily for 104 weeks. The trial was stopped for futility when 40% of the patients reached the follow-up of 104 weeks. There was no difference in score on the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale-Sum of Boxes and there was even a worse outcome in the higher-dose group.

The transition from cognitive impairment to dementia was about 20%-25% per year, and this was, again, not different.

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