Enterecept, the medication mentioned in the article, has already been approved by the FDA, which means that doctor’s can use it in off-label uses. Considering how much the average person now researches online, if this has any therapeutic value at all, I think we’ll see a steep rise in the number of people treated for Alzheimer’s with this medication.
For the patients’ sakes and the sakes of their loved ones, I sure hope this works.
As far as the physiological possibility of a drug “waking up” a person who seems to be completely shut down, in a matter of minutes, L-dopa really does work miracles on Parkinson’s patients that fast. Of course, the effect eventually wears off.
I’m disbelieving it on general principles. How many wonder cures have come and gone, versus how many have actually shown staying power? In fact, I can’t really call to mind even a single pharmaceutical wonder cure. Can anyone else?
Sulfa drugs
Aspirin
Salk’s polio vaccine
Pasteur’s rabies treatment
Penicillin
SSRIs
coumadin/warfrin
Sal
Insulin means life rather than death for all Type I and many Type II diabetics
Smallpox vaccine eradicated a once deadly disease
Digoxin has enabled many folks with incapacitating heart failure to live normal lives for centuries
Albuterol enabled asthmatics to survive their disease’s acute attacks far, far more often
Prednisone extended the lives and functionality of many folks with Rheumatoid Arthritis and other auto-immune diseases far beyond what it had been without such treatment
Isoniazid cured many previously uncurable cases of TB
Antiretroviral agents have made HIV a disease to live with rather than a death sentence
And those are just the ones I thought up in the past 5 minutes. Want more?
My heart’s OK, but will this stuff let me live a normal life for centuries anyway?
Viva Viagra!
No, no, that’s fine. I think I wasn’t clear that by “wonder cures” I was alluding to drugs like the one mentioned in the OP that suddenly restored health (as in “cure Alzheimer’s in minutes”), particularly for chronic conditions.
Okay, now I get your point. 
Those are fewer, not not non-existent.
Clot-busters come to mind, dissolving an obstructing blood clot in an artery leading to the heart or the brain, and restoring normal heart or brain functioning in minutes.
I’d think that, if it wears off and isn’t too expensive (though that’s probably not true), it might be viable to have a patch so that the drug is administered continuously and the patient remains functional.
I don’t think a traditional patch would work - picunurse mentioned the risks with cervical spinal injections upthread. Perhaps QtM can weigh in, but my understanding is that the spinal fluid really doesn’t get much interaction with the other fluids in the body. So, getting an appreciable dose of the medication where it needs to go may not be possible with a patch.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but does anyone know if, after the effect of the L-dopa drug wears off, the patient’s body is capable of responding to the drug the way it did originally if they don’t receive it for some time, thus allowing repeated awakenings? Or does a body’s resistance remain constant regardless of exposure?
(I seem to recall that there is an illegal drug - can’t remember which - that does work that way - that addicts who go to rehab and clear their system of the drug have less tolerance when they take it anew and get a high comparable to when they first started using.)
I believe (I’m not speaking as an authority, just somebody with a bachelor’s in animal physiology) that Parkinson’s patients do continue to take L-Dopa and derive benefit from it for years and years… though I also believe that in each individual patient it gradually becomes less and less effective. Doctors, am I right?
The disease in Awakenings was encephalitus lethargica, not Parkinson’s.
Medscape has an article about this, from January 2008. It says “The study is published online January 9 in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.”
Here’s the study in the Journal of Neuroinflammation Their website also has a lot of other interesting studies.
As described in “awakenings”, the effects of L-Dopa would vary unpredictably, and sometimes would stop working at all (for good).
Apparently each dose could change the brain chemistry enough that the next dose would not be predictable as to results.
I am not a doctor.