Study of Potential Alzheimer’s Treatment

Alzheimer’s is one of the world’s deadliest diseases. The rate at which people develop the disease has begun to increase and made the search for treatment even more urgent. The study “Lecanemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease”, published January 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine and written by H. van Dyck et al.6, observes how successful the treatment lecanemab is. The journal is written in the IMRAD format in order to efficiently display the study’s findings and uses scientific jargon for the same purpose. The authors write in a passive tone and effectively convey their findings in order to inform their audience of the effects of this new Alzheimer’s treatment.

The abstract is written entirely in the passive tone with the exception of the first sentence in the methods overview. It concisely summarizes the information of each section in the journal. The first paragraph of the introduction sets up the research problem to be answered by discussing the current state of Alzheimer treatments and describing how administering a treatment that is anti-amyloid may be more efficient in affecting the disease. The second paragraph of the introduction goes on to cite sources from previous studies that illustrate what lecanemab is and how it can be used as a treatment. This helps the researchers form their research question, which is the effects of lecanemab over longer periods of time. The methods section outlined the details of how the experiment was conducted, with subtitles such as eligibility criteria, end points, and statistical analysis.  This section included a chart describing how the participants moved throughout the experiment, a table outlining the statistics of the patients, and several graphs displaying their results.

The results section was split into three sections: participants, end-point results, and safety. The participants section discusses the statistics of the effectiveness of lecanemab regionally and on different racial groups. The end-point results include the statistics of the experiment as a whole and note that numerically lecanemab performs better than the placebo. This section also contains a table that displays the statistical results of the experiment. The safety section reports the safety concerns surrounding the treatment and the deaths that took place during the experiment, but they note that none of the deaths were directly linked to lecanemab. In the discussion section, the authors acknowledge that they cannot definitively say what these results might mean for the future of Alzheimer’s disease, but they highlight that lecanemab numerically did better than the placebo. They include their limitations, some of which were that their trial length was too short to determine anything conclusive and that the trial took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, causing delays and missed doses for patients, among other things. Ultimately the researchers determined that in order to fully answer their research question, longer trials should be done. 

This study outlined the effects of a potential Alzheimer’s treatment in a thorough and concise manner. Written in the IMRAD format, this study not only successfully conveys new information, but furthers research into the field of Alzheimer’s treatment and provides hope to people affected by this disease.

References

H. van Dyck C, M.D., J. Swanson C, Ph.D., Aisen P, M.D., J. Bateman R, M.D.,  et al. 2023. Lecanemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease. The New England Journal of Medicine