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Landmark Study Focuses on Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease in Black Americans

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the brain-destroying illness Alzheimer’s disease is an emerging public health crisis among older African Americans. Not only is the incidence of Alzheimer’s much higher in black Americans than in whites, but black patients also tend to be diagnosed at a later stage of the disease, when cognitive function has already declined substantially. And the crisis is expected to grow as more black baby boomers age: The number of African Americans aged 65 and older will more than double by the year 2030.

Although there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, medical treatments such as the popular drug Aricept® (donepezil HCI tablets) can help ease some of the disease’s devastating symptoms. Now a landmark study--the first clinical trial to assess the benefit of Aricept treatment exclusively in African Americans--reports that black patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s experienced significant improvements in cognition and global function after being treated with the drug for a 12-week period. The study’s findings were presented in April at the 57th annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology.

The Treatment of Alzheimer’s in African American Patients (TAAAP) clinical trial studied 126 African American patients from 26 locations across the U.S. After up to four weeks of screening and a one-week baseline period, they were given open-label Aricept, 5mg/day, which was increased to 10 mg after four weeks at the discretion of the investigator. Measurements were taken at baseline and at four-week intervals. After 12 weeks, most patients treated with the drug showed significantly improved scores on such cognitive tests as the Mini-Mental State Examination, the Clinician’s Interview-Based Impression of Change and the Fuld Object Memory Evaluation.

“These findings are important because they suggest the benefits of treatment with Aricept in African American patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease,” says the TAAAP study’s lead investigator, Patrick Griffith, MD, professor of clinical medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. “This should serve as a call to action for African American patients, caregivers and their physicians to watch for early signs of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms, such as memory loss, and intervene with treatment.”