Norman Swan

Mostly causes you side effects rather than actually any benefit.

It does.

It wastes your money.

And just before we go, this is a hobby horse of mine.

The waste of money internationally and time that's been spent on a theory for Alzheimer's disease, which is invalid now.

And we spend more and more money on it, and it's distracted us from an effective solution to Alzheimer's disease.

And it's the idea that this substance in the brain called beta amyloid is a cause of Alzheimer's disease.

Because there's a lot of it in the brain, but people think it's a cause.

And there is very little evidence that it's a cause.

And one of the pointers to this is,

that there are drugs now that are incredibly effective at removing amyloid from the brain, such as there's almost none left.

And the question is, does it make any difference?

So it's not made any difference to people with established dementia.

So what the people have said who are really promoting the idea is, let's move it earlier and earlier to people with mild cognitive impairment, because that's early enough that we can actually make a difference.

And now the Cochrane Library or the Cochrane Collaboration, which brings together the available evidence on this,

has concluded that really these drugs are not effective.

They hardly improve function.

They don't affect the tract to dementia and they are associated with side effects.

So we need to move on.

Unfortunately, they do the job.