Aricept

In my experience, Aricept did nothing to calm angry outbursts or slow progression. Have not tried Seroquel for DH as yet.

My husband's neuro also said he thought Aricept was useless.

It made a significant difference for my husband, but only lasted 3 months. And that was early in his diagnosis!

How about memantine? DW's neuro has her on both Aricept and memantine. I don't think they're doing anything for her, but how could you tell? The neuro did say she could discontinue the memantine, but I was afraid to do that in case it really was doing something.

Aside: DW asks what that blue pill is for. I tell her "to improve memory", and we both laugh.

It’s very hard to know if Aricept, rivastegmine or others work. The disease can remain stable with no drugs, decline with no drugs, stay stable with drugs, or decline with drugs. Each patients timeline is different. Each decline for one patient is different. So how can you possibly tell if the memory drugs do anything? And the side effects are such that many people can’t take the needed dosage.

At least you can tell if Seraquel is working. The patient either calms down or they don’t.

In controlled clinical studies where some got Aricept and others didn’t, a comparison of progression of dementia between the two groups favored Aricept in a statistically significant way. Whether this difference was clinically significant (in real life) remains open for discussion.

Knowing this, I still offered Aricept to my husband. It was all we had. I also had him participate in one of the trials with monoclonal antibodies, which failed. After that, I signed him up for infusion of intravenous immune globulin without any data that it was effective. Desperate people, desperate times.