After 12 weeks of treatment, the Aricept treatment groups changed by 2.7 and 3.0 units on the ADAS-cog. After the 3-week placebo washout, the scores for the groups increased because the washout period duration was not long enough to predict the loss of treatment effect. Another study on the effects of Aricept was presented at the 50 th annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. Larry E. Tune, M.D., a professor at the Emory Center on Aging in Atlanta and chief of Geriatric Psychiatry at Wesley Woods Hospital in Atlanta conducted it. This study s goal was to prove a change in the functional activity of the brain of a patient taking Aricept using the PET technique.
PET measures the cerebral glucose metabolism using radioactively labeled tracers.
This technique can estimate the glucose metabolism in whole sections or in regions of interest. PET studies have shown that a reduction in cerebral glucose metabolism is linked with Alzheimer-type dementia. At the end of the study, no apparent changes in global functional brain activity occurred in the Aricept patients. This study shows that Aricept patients experience retention of cerebral glucose metabolism. In a study by Rogers et al.