Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11151

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Publication type: news

Goldstein J.
British Court Backs Restrictions on Alzheimer’s Drugs
The Wall Street Journal Health Blog 2007 Aug 10
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/08/10/british-court-backs-restrictions-on-alzheimers-drugs/?mod=yahoo_hs

Notes:

Links not included here

Full text:

Is a drug worth any price? Not in the U.K., where a court largely upheld a rule that effectively bans the prescription of Alzheimer’s drugs to patients in the early stages of the disease.

The ruling backed the conclusion of a national agency called NICE, which determined the drugs’ benefit in early-stage patients wasn’t worth the cost to the National Health Service, about $1,500 per year per patient. Alzheimer’s drugs may slow the onset of the disease in some patients, but not prevent it.

Pfizer and Eisai, which co-market the Alzheimer’s drug Aricept, have been fighting with NICE for years over this issue – and not wholly in vain. In 2005, the agency issued a preliminary ruling calling on doctors to stop prescribing the drugs altogether. After patient groups and drugmakers protested, and drug companies provided more data, the agency changed course, and said the drugs were cost-effective for patients with moderate Alzheimer’s.

NICE – the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence – was founded in 1999, and has performed cost-benefit analyses on scores of drugs, often restricting their uses. The calculations NICE used to make it’s determination on the Alzheimer’s drugs haven’t been made public, the Telegraph reports.

Eisai said it would appeal today’s ruling. “NICE have got it wrong and they have got it wrong under a shroud of secrecy, seeking to keep their computer model non-transparent,” the company’s UK managing director said in a statement.

The court did order the agency to require that non-English speakers and people with learning disabilities be properly assessed to determine whether they have moderate Alzheimer’s. While this was the first time a court had overruled NICE on one of its recommendations, the effect appears marginal.

See NICE’s comments on the ruling here. Eisai’s comments are here.