More dementia ‘breakthroughs’ as failed drugs go unreported

BBC News reports on rember, a new drug for dementia that shows promising results in a phase II trial. Another trial suggests that statins might prevent or delay the onset of dementia.

New therapies for dementia seem to be coming along thick and fast (eg dimebon) and the press love to write stories about them. But how many of them actually work? Take tarenflurbil for instance. As recently as June, BBC News reported on this exciting new drug:

Experimental drugs are being hailed as a potentially exciting step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s. The drugs, still in clinical trials, form a new class called gamma-secretase modulators (GSM). Doctors are in the third and final phase of trials on human volunteers to test the first GSM, a molecule called tarenflurbil, branded as Flurizan.

Unfortunately, trials on tarenflurbil have been abandoned since the trial “had failed to achieve statistical significance on either of its two primary endpoints”. This is according to the press release from the International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease – the same conference where rember was presented. So why did the BBC not report on this as well?

BBC caption which says it all: "Jimmy Hardie used to mistakenly put sugar in the fridge"