FDA grants first full approval for an Alzheimer’s drug in 20 years

The FDA on Thursday granted traditional approval to an Alzheimer’s drug for the first time in more than two decades.

Now, the question becomes how many people will be able to access the drug, which is targeted at patients in the early stages of the debilitating disease. Medicare has said that it will reimburse the drug’s costs — more than $26,000 annually — only for beneficiaries enrolled in a nationwide registry that tracks patient side effects and outcomes over time. Patient advocacy groups and some clinicians fear this means that few of the hundreds of thousands of Alzheimer’s patients eligible...