A Good Discussion About Losing One's Mind

"Better Treatments Soon Are Called Unlikely," the New York Times reported today. The subject was treating Alzheimer's disease. There are a handful of drugs on the market, but it turns out their benefits are minimal.

The part of today's story that was most shocking was the recounting of last July's report in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society that claimed Pfizer's drug Aricept could delay a patient's entry into nursing home care for nearly two years. Critics in as yet unpublished letters to that journal said the study's data did not support the claim. The study's authors were paid -- you guessed it -- by Pfizer. (For a great discussion of why it is getting harder and harder to trust medical journals, see Shannon Brownlee's story in the April Washington Monthly, "Doctors Without Borders: Why you can't trust medical journals anymore."

Alzheimer's is the "dread disease" of aging. Nothing strikes greater fear into Baby Boomers' hearts as they contemplate their golden years. But despite the billions of dollars poured into industry's coffers to pay for a research and development, we still only have a handful of drugs whose chief benefit is to the companies' bottom lines, not their patients.

The sad fact is that scientists still don't know what causes Alzheimer's or even how the cognitive brain functions whose impairment we call Alzheimer's work. If you don't understand the basic science of natural functions like memory and cognition, how is it possible to come up with drugs to combat age-related impairments in those functions?

As if to counter the Times story, C-Span this morning interviewed the chairman of Pfizer. He complained about senior citizens importing low-cost drugs from Canada. He said it would choke off innovation in the U.S.

The truth is that we're wasting our money when we subsidize drug companies with high prices in the vain hope that they will come up with the next generation of cures. The government, which is about to spend $540 billion on drugs for senior citizens over the next ten years, would be better off spending its marginal health care dollar on more research into the basic causes of the diseases that most concern us. Because until we know why we get sick, there is no possibility of coming up with a cure.