Make carer outcomes a primary trial endpoint

Judge dementia treatments by whether households cope better, not only by a clinic memory score.

Would require regulators and funders to accept carer measures as more than exploratory.

Hypothesis

Trials that treat carer time, sleep, and distress as primary endpoints will select treatments that work in households, not only on a cognitive scale.

Rationale

Unpaid care is the delivery system. A medicine that slightly moves a scale but increases infusion burden can still fail families.

Proposed test

Add a pre-specified carer time-and-distress primary or co-primary to a phase 3 or post-licence study, with a published analysis plan.

Maturity

speculative

Who acts

policy

Cost to try

Medium ($1M to $50M)

Years to first evidence

Bottlenecks it attacks

Unpaid care as the hidden delivery system · Most day-to-day dementia care is unpaid. Medicines and scans fail in practice if one person is carrying every task alone.

Connected

Technology
Dementia care navigation
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Person
Alois Alzheimer
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Treatment
Brexpiprazole
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Collection
ClinicalTrials.gov
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Treatment
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Institution
National Institute on Aging
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Technology
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Institution
UCL
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