Donepezil for people with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease

Cochrane: What effects (benefits or harms) does donepezil have on people with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease? Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia. As the disease progresses, people lose the ability to remember, communicate, think clearly and perform the activities of daily living. Their behaviour may also change. In severe Alzheimer's disease people lose the ability to care for themselves.

The most commonly used treatment for Alzheimer's disease are medicines known as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Donepezil is one of these medicines. It is taken as a pill once a day.
In Alzheimer's disease, one of the changes in the brain is a reduced number of nerve cells called cholinergic neurones. These are nerve cells that signal to other cells using a chemical called acetylcholine. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, such as donepezil, work by preventing acetylcholine from being broken down. This may improve the symptoms of dementia. However, acetylcholine is also found elsewhere in the body and so drugs of this type may have unwanted effects.
Review methods
In this review we examined evidence about benefits and harms from studies that compared donepezil, taken for at least 12 weeks, to placebo (a dummy pill), or that compared different doses of donepezil. The studies had to be double-blind and randomised, that is, the decision whether people taking part got donepezil or placebo had to be made randomly and neither they nor the researchers should have known which treatment they were getting while the trial was going on. This was to make the comparison as unbiased, or fair, as possible. We searched for studies up to May 2017. We assessed the quality of all the studies we included. When it was sensible to do so, we analysed the results of studies together to get an overall result.
Key results
We included 30 studies with 8257 participants. Most of the people in the studies had mild or moderate dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, but in nine studies they had moderate or severe dementia. Almost all of the studies lasted six months or less. The majority of the studies were known to have been funded by the manufacturer of donepezil.
We found that people with Alzheimer's disease who took 10 mg of donepezil a day for six months did slightly better than people taking placebo, on scales measuring their cognitive function (e.g. thinking and remembering), how well they could manage their daily activities, and the overall impression of a trained researcher. We did not find any effect on behaviour or quality of life.
People taking donepezil were more likely than those taking placebo to report side effects and to drop out of the studies. Most side effects were described as mild. Nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea were most common.
Comparing 5 mg of donepezil a day with 10 mg/day, people on 5 mg had fewer side effects, but did slightly less well on cognitive function tests. A higher dose (23 mg/day) offered no advantages and was associated with more side effects.
There is some evidence that use of donepezil is neither more nor less expensive than placebo when total health care costs are taken into account.
Quality of the evidence
In general, we thought that the quality of the evidence was moderate. The main factor reducing our confidence was concern that the results of some studies might have been biased by the way they were done. We cannot be sure that the results apply to treatment longer than six months.
Conclusions
After six months of treatment, there are benefits of donepezil that are large enough to measure in studies. It is associated with side effects that are mainly mild, but that may cause people to stop treatment.
Being able to stabilise cognitive performance or ability to maintain activities of daily living may be important clinically. In terms of total healthcare costs the use of donepezil appears cost neutral. However, there does not appear to be an effect on quality of life. More data are still required from longer-term clinical studies examining measures of disease progression or time to needing full time care.

Authors' conclusions: 

There is moderate-quality evidence that people with mild, moderate or severe dementia due to Alzheimer's disease treated for periods of 12 or 24 weeks with donepezil experience small benefits in cognitive function, activities of daily living and clinician-rated global clinical state. There is some evidence that use of donepezil is neither more nor less expensive compared with placebo when assessing total healthcare resource costs. Benefits on 23 mg/day were no greater than on 10 mg/day, and benefits on the 10 mg/day dose were marginally larger than on the 5 mg/day dose, but the rates of withdrawal and of adverse events before end of treatment were higher the higher the dose.