Patients, Pharmaceutical Companies Take Britain to Court Over Alzheimer Drug Access

On Monday, drug companies Eisai and Pfizer joined with the Alzheimer's Society, a patients group, in asking the British High Court to force the country's National Health Service to provide access to three Alzheimer's drugs.

The NHS, which offers free and low-cost medicine to all Britons, currently provides the drugs -- donepezil, rivastigmine and galamantine -- to people in middle and late stages of the disease.

However, the NHS has followed the advice of the National Institute for
Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the UK's prescription drug regulator, who said last year that the treatments are expensive and not particularly effective, and aren't cost effective enough to recommend for use in people with early-stage Alzheimer's.

The plaintiffs ...

... argue that NICE did not properly evaluate the impact of the drugs on the quality of life of carers and that the figures on the cost of long-term care used in their analysis were too low.

And the defense respond:

"The reality is that, for Alzheimer's disease, drugs are only part of the care that needs to be offered.

"Non-drug interventions have an important part to play and the evidence indicates that drugs are simply not effective for some patients."

(Note: I want to make clear that I'm not taking sides on this argument
-- it's just an instructive snapshot of the tensions inevitable in universal health care, or in any health care system that struggles to do the most it can with limited resources.)

Related Wired coverage here and here.

Alzheimer's drugs court challenge [BBC]

Court Weighs Alzheimer Drug Access Issue [Associated Press]

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