Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Drug Trials, Failures and Progress: Data Update 2024

According to latest report of 2024 by World Health Organization (WHO) based on global data of 2021, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other forms of dementia is placed at seventh position among the leading cause of death, that accounts for killing of 1.8 million lives by the disease; and stroke causes highest number of deaths in the world ("World Health Organisation (WHO) The top 10 causes of death https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-causes-of-death ", 2024) Similarly, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics in 2024 also reported AD to be seventh leading cause of death in the United States, based on data from 2021 to 2022 accounting 1.2 millions of deaths.("CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, Leading Causes of Death https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm," 2024). This alarming number of deaths due to AD is the call for the urgent need to find proper treatment or cure of the disease. AD also severely affects the global economy. However, there is no appropriate treatment or cure available. In the past two decades thousands of disease modifying drugs have been developed to treat dementia of AD, however most of the drugs could not pass phase I clinical trial and only a few could reach phase II and phase III stage. This review is determined to provide the status of various clinical trials, failures and progress of success of various drugs that have been designed to tread dementia of AD.