Spot the error The “safe” wonder drug for Alzheimer’s is neither

I used to get a weekly email letter from a marketing copywriter who would deliberately put a grammar or spelling error in the text each time. I was never sure what the prize was if you spotted it, but I think it was getting the following week’s letter, which was free anyway.

That was a long time ago, could be 14 months or so. In that time, everything has gotten quicker, and nobody has any time to trawl through 200 words of copy (aside from when reading WDDTY, of course).

So, for all you high-fliers in the super-fast lane of success, we’re keeping the errors to the headlines so you have to read only 12 words or so. And we have a breathtakingly good one to get you started.  It appeared on the website of the UK’s Daily Telegraph the other month, and it reads: “Alzheimer’s wonder drug blocked for use on NHS despite being safe.”

Frankly, it’s an easy one to start with because there are two errors in those 12 words (that’s an error rate close to 20 percent), and the prize is next month’s Last Word, provided you’re still subscribing.

First, a little context. The headline and article are talking about the “wonder drug” lecanemab, an anti-amyloid immunotherapy treatment. One study claimed it slowed cognitive decline by 27 percent, although, more precisely, it reduced levels of amyloid protein in the brains of patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s, and this didn’t actually have any direct effect on cognition.¹

Just so you get the point here: the drug didn’t stop cognitive decline. It merely slowed the progress of amyloid buildup, which has been blamed for Alzheimer’s disease based on falsified data,² and it certainly didn’t reverse the problem.

The BMJ, which published the study, agreed. The results didn’t “necessarily reflect a meaningful improvement for the patients,” it declared in an accompanying editorial.

So, there’s the clue to the first error in the headline: it isn’t a wonder drug at all.

This dubious “success” was nonetheless good enough for the UK’s drug regulator, the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to allow the drug to be prescribed, although only to private patients whose insurers were happy to cough up the £20,000 ($26,400) required for annual infusions.

This was an outrage to the drug’s advocates, including pharma-funded Alzheimer’s support groups, who breathlessly described it as spelling “the beginning of the end” for Alzheimer’s treatment. The less well-heeled were being denied this “wonder drug,” and money shouldn’t get in the way of health, right? Right, and indeed the US Food and Drug Administration (motto: “None shall pass”) approved the drug last year.

The excitement isn’t shared around Europe. The European Medicines Agency has refused to approve lecanemab because of “safety issues.”

Safety issues? Oh yes, we forgot to mention that three of the participants in the initial trial died after suffering brain bleeds. It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of the drug, that and brain swelling. In fact, 25 percent of the study patients suffered one or the other.

So that’s the second clue in our Spot the Error headline competition: any drug that causes life-threatening reactions in 25 percent of people isn’t safe, so well done if you spotted that.

Hyperbolic claims about the next Alzheimer’s wonder drug give folks like Patrick Holford the screaming abdabs. Patrick was taught at the knee of nutritional pioneer Linus Pauling—who, 50 years or more ago, was looking for natural solutions to Alzheimer’s and dementia—and he has continued the work through his Food for the Brain Foundation (foodforthebrain.org).

For Patrick, the only wonder is that nobody is picking up on the clear solution to the Alzheimer’s epidemic: B vitamins. As we get older, levels of homocysteine, an amino acid, can rise. It plays a vital role in the creation of proteins, but too much of it can cause arterial stiffness, and stiff arteries in the brain can lead to Alzheimer’s. High homocysteine is a sign of vitamin deficiency, and it can be countered by taking vitamins B12 (cobalamin), B6 (pyridoxine) and B9 (folate).

In one study, a third of patients with pre-dementia didn’t develop the problem after taking B vitamins for a year.³ But it’s vital to combine the vitamins with omega-3 fish oil supplements, which achieves three times greater results than taking lecanemab.⁴

Now, that’s a true wonder, and it’s not an error.

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