By Daniel Gibbs, MD, retired neurologist and author, and Jason Karlawish, MD, co-director of the Penn Memory Center, geriatrician, and author
Both of us are physicians dedicated to the care of persons living with Alzheimer’s disease. We’ve heard thousands of moving stories from persons struggling with a fading capacity to exercise their free will and their friends and family members devoting time, effort, and resources to care for them. We feel their desperation.
For one of us, this feeling isn’t simply professional. It’s intensely personal. Nine years ago, Dan retired from practicing neurology because of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) caused by Alzheimer’s disease.
We wish we could have celebrated in June, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Biogen’s drug aducanumab, marketed as Aduhelm, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. We wish we were now condemning the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for its recent proposal to limit coverage of the drug to patients enrolled in a clinical trial of Aduhelm, known as “coverage with evidence development.” Instead, we weren’t celebrating in June, and now we thank Medicare for its courageous and reasonable proposal.