The first Alzheimer’s therapy to clearly slow cognitive decline, approved in the United States last month, lifted the hope of patients and their families. But creating access to the program is a painfully slow process, even in Massachusetts, where large hospital systems have been preparing for months to administer the much-anticipated medicine.
Thousands of patients are stuck on waiting lists across the state and nationally as hospitals struggle to ramp up infusion centers and monitoring processes for the drug, called Leqembi, while neurologists grapple with workforce and capacity constraints.
“We have a database of over 140 people who have expressed interest, but we don’t have the capacity to treat them all,” said Dr. Daniel Press, chief of the cognition neurology unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is scrambling to get its treatment program up and running. “The list is growing faster than we can evaluate people.”