Do People Want to Live Longer With Alzheimer’s Disease?

Do People Want to Live Longer With Alzheimer’s Disease?
By Jason Karlawish, MD
Wall Street Journal
December 14, 2023
... As Robert, his wife and I talked about these [new] medicines [to treat patients with Alzheimer’s disease], something very interesting happened. After objectively weighing the risks and benefits, we began to discuss an intensely personal and subjective question: Does he want to live longer with Alzheimer’s disease? This question is ethically challenging.
Editor’s Note: The author is a physician, co-director of the Penn Memory Center, and the author of “The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It.”