Associations which wanted the reimbursement again of certain drugs against Alzheimer’s disease have just been dismissed by the Council of State. According to the High Authority for Health, these treatments “have insufficient medical benefit to justify their reimbursement”.
Since 1er August 2018, four drugs against Alzheimer’s disease are no longer reimbursed by Social Security. The treatments – and their generics – concerned are AEbixa (Lundbeck), Aricept (Eisai), Exelon (Novartis Pharma) and Reminyl (Janssen Cilag). Previously, they were covered up to 15% by Health Insurance, which represented a cost of approximately 90 million euros in 2015. While associations contested this decision taken by the Ministry of Health, the Council of State has just dismissed them.
An “insufficient medical interest”
The highest administrative court considers that the ministry did not “commit a manifest error of assessment in judging the medical service provided by these specialties insufficient (…) and in deciding to strike them off the list of reimbursable medicines for this reason. ”. In October 2016, the transparency commission of the High Authority for Health (HAS), which evaluates treatments with a view to their reimbursement or not, had judged that these drugs had “insufficient medical interest to justify their reimbursement”. In addition, the HAS underlined “the existence of potentially serious adverse effects”.
Harmful consequences, according to associations
At the beginning of this year, the association France Alzheimer drew up an initial assessment of drug reimbursement. The first consequence is that many patients then decided to stop taking the treatments. Thus, more than half of the people questioned (52%) by the organization considered that the abrupt cessation of the drugs had led to a precipitous aggravation of the disorders. A man, for example, had seen his motor skills drastically decrease in eight days. Finally, still according to France Alzheimer, 80% of respondents believed that the ineffectiveness of anti-Alzheimer’s drugs put forward by the government was unfounded.
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