Lord Cameron Demands NHS Approval for Rejected Alzheimer’s Drugs

POLICY WIRE — London, UK — Former Prime Minister Lord David Cameron is spearheading a movement to grant Alzheimer’s patients access to specific medications that were previously denied approval by the National Health Service.

Joining forces with dozens of dementia care experts, Lord Cameron is also advocating for a government mandate to limit wait times for a formal disease diagnosis to 18 weeks, according to reports from the Telegraph.

While modern therapies like lecanemab and donanemab have marked significant milestones in medical science, several lower-cost alternatives exist for which the side effect profiles are already well understood by medical professionals.

Although these affordable medicines received licenses in 2024, they remain unavailable to the general public outside of specific clinical trial frameworks.

Lord Cameron, who serves as the president of the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, lost his mother to the condition in 2025. He argued that effective drugs currently stalled by lack of official approval must be made available to the public.

Reflecting on his time in office, Lord Cameron expressed pride in establishing the National Dementia Challenge, which doubled funding for treatment research and initiated a major offensive against the illness, he told the Telegraph.

He noted that the decade since that initiative has seen massive advancements, resulting in new therapies capable of slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Cameron emphasized that there is an urgent need to create pathways for providing access to these current drugs and future innovations so that patients can benefit from the rapid pace of medical breakthroughs.

In a related development, Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently supported a trial aimed at accelerating the discovery of cures for Alzheimer’s, the most prevalent form of dementia, impacting roughly 600,000 individuals across the UK.

Reporting by Policy-Wire (PW)