Professor Donna Wilcock explains that Aricept can only provide short-term benefit in treating Alzheimer's disease.

Most of the medications, in fact all of the medications right now that are FDA approved for Alzheimer’s disease are really symptomatic and not really what we like to call disease-modifying. Aricept targets acetylcholine and essentially means that there is more acetylcholine in the brain to help with memory formation and memory recall. But this is really just a symptomatic treatment, and it’s a temporary benefit that will last about six months, usually. After that six-month period, eventually that Alzheimer’s patient is going to catch up to another Alzheimer’s patient who has not received Aricept. So, it just gives a temporary benefit, which at this point is the best we can do. But it’s only going to give you a short term benefit with your memory. The aim from a research standpoint is to really get to disease-modifying drugs that will modify either the amyloid plaques or neurofibrillary tangles and ultimately prevent the neuron loss that we think is causing the cognitive decline.

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