Drug News Anti-psychotic drugs double death risk in Alzheimer's patients
By Sue Mueller
Jan 9, 2009 - 9:29:53 AM
If you like the article, could you please do us a favor? Just tell Google News Services that you like foodconsumer.org included in Google News Services. Inclusion in googlenewsservices means many more people can read articles like this. Thanks.
------
Jan
09, 2009 (foodconsumer.org) -- A study published Friday in the medical journal
Lancet Neurology showed that patients with Alzheimer's disease when treated
with antipsychotic drugs were twice as likely to die as those who did not
receive treatment within a few years.
Lead
author, Clive Ballard of the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases at King's
College London was quoted as saying that "for the vast majority of
Alzheimer's patients, taking these drugs is probably not a worthwhile
risk."
Ballard
said cited by the Associatedpress that he would not venture to double his risk
of dying just because they can slightly reduce the aggression of the disease.
For
the study, Ballard and colleagues followed 165 patients aged 67 to 100 years
with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s between 2001 and 2004 in Britain.
Half patients took anti-psychotic drugs
including Risperdal, Thorazine and Stelazine and the other half used placebos.
After
two years, the researchers found that 46 percent of Alzheimer's patients on
anti-psychotic drugs were alive compared to 71 percent on placebos. The
majority of deaths during the study were from pneumonia.
In
the United Kingdom and the United States, it is advised that doctors give
anti-psychotic drugs to Alzheimer’s patients cautiously and temporarily. But in
Europe and North America, up to 60 percent of the patients receive the drugs
for one or two years.
It
is uncertain how the drugs affect Alzheimer's patients.
Some experts according to theAP believe that
the drugs could damage the brain and affect the patients’ ability to exercise
leading to high risk of deadly infections.
Alzheimer's
disease, resulting from abnormal aging, is fetal and has no cure.
Doctors do not know what causes the disease
and how to prevent it.