Aricept, a drug long used to treat Alzheimer's disease, can delay its onset a bit but does not prevent it, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. And vitamin E has no effect, they reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. "These findings, from the Memory Impairment Study, are the first to suggest than any agent can delay the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease in people with mild cognitive impairment," the National Institute on Aging, which helped pay for the study, said in a statement. Aricept, known generically as donepezil, is made by Pfizer and Japan's Eisai Co. Ltd. and also generically by India's Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. "These findings give me a great deal of hope," said Dr. Ronald Petersen of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who led the study. "We have not answered the question of whether donepezil reduces the underlying brain changes in Alzheimer's disease, but now we know that for some people, drug therapy did make a real, clinical difference. I think there will be real opportunities in the future to test other therapies for patients with mild cognitive impairment." For their study, Petersen and colleagues enrolled 769 people with an average age of 73 and mild cognitive impairment -- which can progress to the severe memory loss that marks Alzheimer's. --More 2308 Local Time 2008 GMT
