A June 17 article in the Los Angeles Times highlighted an important safety risk associated with the new class of medications recently approved for treating Alzheimer’s disease (https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2024-06-17/alzheimers-drug-has-potentially-fatal-side-effects). The article highlighted the importance of these potential side effects, emphasizing a few rare cases that were in fact fatal. The article downplayed the efficacy of these treatments, noting that patients and families wouldn’t notice the difference. Do we need more effective, safer, more convenient treatments for people living with Alzheimer’s disease? The media can affect attitudes toward new treatments, toward potential false hope with pseudomedicines (https://mind.uci.edu/the-rise-of-pseudomedicine-for-dementia-and-brain-health/), and toward research (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36245381/).

Source: Los Angeles Times June 29, 2024 04:00 UTC