Lord Cameron Leads Call for Wider NHS Access to Alzheimer’s Drugs and 18-Week Diagnosis Limit
Former prime minister Lord Cameron is among a group of leading dementia specialists calling for Alzheimer’s medicines currently unavailable on the NHS to be made accessible to patients.
The group is also pressing for a maximum 18-week wait between referral and diagnosis, according to a report in the Telegraph.
The signatories argue that, although newer drugs such as lecanemab and donanemab have moved dementia treatment forward, other medicines could offer a cheaper alternative. Clinicians also already have a good understanding of the side-effect risks for some of these. The drugs were licensed for use in Britain in 2024, but remain available on the NHS only to those taking part in clinical trials.
Lord Cameron, who is president of Alzheimer’s Research UK, lost his mother to the disease in 2025. He said effective treatments that have yet to be approved should be made available.
Speaking to the Telegraph, he recalled launching the National Dementia Challenge while in Downing Street, a programme that doubled research investment in the condition. He said “huge progress has been made” in the decade since, and that treatments able to slow the disease’s progression now exist.
He added that ways must urgently be found to give patients access to these and future medicines, so they can benefit from advances already made and from innovations still to come.
The call follows last month’s announcement that Prime Minister Andy Burnham had thrown his support behind a new trial designed to speed up the search for Alzheimer’s treatments. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia and affects around 600,000 people in the UK.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “Decisions on whether to approve treatments for routine use by the NHS are taken independently by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, based on an evidence-based assessment of the costs and benefits, and they are currently evaluating these two treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
“Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease, and we are taking action to tackle it through improved research, care and treatment. We recently announced the investment of £33 million through the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Goals programme to increase the recruitment of people into clinical studies for new dementia treatments, speeding up clinical trials and bringing promising new drugs to patients at a quicker pace.
“We are also developing the first ever Modern Service Framework for Frailty and Dementia to deliver rapid and significant improvements in quality of care and appointing a National Dementia Tsar to drive further progress in this area.
“But we know there is more to do, so we are also bringing forward the timetable for Baroness Casey’s commission on reform of the social care system, with support for dementia as one of the central priorities for the new National Care Service, which will drive up standards of care across the country.”
The study, named Ad-Smart (Alzheimer’s disease Systematic Multi-arm Adaptive Randomised Trial), could cut the time needed to test potential treatments by more than half, experts say. Mr Burnham, whose father Roy died with Alzheimer’s in September, said he was proud to back a trial that might deliver answers faster than conventional methods.
Decisions on whether treatments are approved for routine NHS use rest with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).
