What medications are available to manage dementia?

What medications are available to manage dementia?

Drugs approved for the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, include:

• Cholinesterase inhibitors, including donepezil (Aricept®), rivastigmine (Exelon®) and galantamine (Razadyne®).
• NMDA receptor antagonist memantine (Namenda®).
• Anti-amyloid antibody aducanumab (Aduhelm®).

Healthcare providers use these drugs to treat people with some of the other forms of dementia.

Cholinesterase inhibitors and the NMDA receptor antagonist affect different chemical processes in your brain. Both drug classes have been shown to provide some benefit in improving or stabilizing memory function in some people with dementia.

Cholinesterase inhibitors manage the chemicals in your brain that allow messages to be sent between brain cells, which is needed for proper brain function. (Connections are lost as brain cells die when dementia worsens.) Memantine works similarly to cholinesterase inhibitors except it works on a different chemical messenger and helps the nerve cells survive longer.

Aducanumab targets amyloid proteins, which build up into the plaques seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Although none of these drugs appear to stop the progression of the underlying disease, they may slow it down.

If other medical conditions are causing dementia or co-exist with dementia, healthcare providers prescribe the appropriate drugs used to treat those specific conditions. These other conditions include sleeping problems, depression, hallucinations and agitation.