Reviews

Drugs for Alzheimer's disease

Searching on the internet for impartial professional information about drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease, indeed any drugs, can be tricky. Key in "Alzheimer's," and you are confronted with 286 000 pages (and rapidly rising). Key in the drug name, even the generic name, and you have to dissociate the information from drug company advertising and sponsorship. With a fairly new drug such as galantamine hydrobromidethe subject of a paper in this week's BMJ (p 1445) and a drug not yet listed in the British National Formularythere is the additional difficulty of spelling. Is it galantamine (the recommended international non-proprietary spelling) or galanthamine? Searching with each brings up a different set of results, many of which are pages posted by users' carers and relatives desperately seeking a cure.

The Alzheimer Research Forum (www.alzforum.org), a non-profit making site set up to serve the scientific and clinical research community, is an excellent source of information on new drugs, and it states clearly that it does not endorse any medical product or treatment. It lists all treatments in clinical trials and clicking on them expands the information available, bringing up, for example, abstracts of published research. As well as online forums, it offers three categories of search for three kinds of userresearchers, primary care doctors, and members of the public. There are also useful links to "Alzheimer associations," specialist treatment centres, and support groups.

For more anecdotal information about drugs of natural origin, visit the lively and colourful site of Natural Land (www.naturalland.com). It was here that I learned about galantamine's apparent discovery in a field of wild Caucasian snowdrops. According to legend, a Bulgarian pharmacologist discovered the drug in the early 1950s after one of his students said the people in her village rubbed snowdrops on their forehead to ease nerve pain.

Trevor Jackson. 

BMJ tjackson{at}bmj.com