Lord Cameron leads calls to approve dementia drugs for NHS

Former prime minister Lord David Cameron is leading calls for drugs that have previously been rejected for use on the NHS to be approved for treating Alzheimer’s.

Lord Cameron has joined dozens of dementia specialists in the plea, and has also called for a maximum 18-week wait for a diagnosis of the disease, the Telegraph reported.

While treatments such as lecanemab and donanemab have advanced the field of drug treatments, other medicines are far cheaper and experts know already about the risk of side-effects for some of them.

They were licensed in 2024, but are not available on the NHS outside clinical trials.

Lord Cameron, president of charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, lost his mother to the disease in 2025. He said drugs that are effective but not currently approved should be unlocked.

“As prime minister, I was proud to launch the National Dementia Challenge, doubling the amount of investment into research for dementia treatments and kick-starting the fightback against this terrible disease that destroys so many lives,” he told the Telegraph.

“More than a decade on, huge progress has been made, meaning we now have treatments available that can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

“However, we urgently need to find ways to unlock access to these dementia drugs, and others on the way, so people can benefit from the amazing progress that is being made and from new innovations on the horizon.”

Last month, prime minister Andy Burnham backed a trial which could dramatically speed up the discovery of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease – the most common type of dementia, which affects around 600,000 people in the UK.

Experts say the new trial, called Ad-Smart (Alzheimer’s disease Systematic Multi-arm Adaptive Randomised Trial), could more than halve the time it takes to test Alzheimer’s treatments.

Mr Burnham, whose father Roy died with Alzheimer’s in September, said he was proud to support the trial in the hope it could deliver results more quickly than traditional methods.

Decisions on whether to approve treatments for routine use by the NHS are made by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).

The Department of Health and Social Care has been contacted for comment.