Beneficios clínicos de la memantina en las alteraciones de la capacidad para realizar actividades de la vida diaria en pacientes con enfermedad de Alzheimer. Revisión sistemática de la bibliografía médica

We performed a systematic review of randomized, controlled clinical trials of memantine in the treatment of moderate and advanced Alzheimer's disease to analyze the effectiveness of this drug in producing functional improvement. Of seven clinical trials, four included patients with vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease and the remainder included patients with Alzheimer's disease only. The review included 1439 patients with a mean age of 72 years. The usual dose of memantine was 20 mg/day. The clinical trials lasted between 6 and 28 weeks. Statistically significant differences were found in favor of memantine when the ADCS-ADL scale was used (mean difference 1.70, 95% confidence interval 0.63 to 2.76, p = 0.002) and a difference of 3.4 points in favor of memantine (p = 0.003) was found when the ADCS-ADLsev was used. Memantine therapy seems to improve activities of daily living in Alzheimer's disease, reducing the amount of time that these patients required care and resource utilization and delaying institutionalization.