A pharmaceutical answer to nonadherence: Once weekly oral memantine for Alzheimer's disease.

Adherence to medication regimens is a major barrier to effective treatment in many disease areas, notably in dementia which causes cognitive impairment that reduces patients' awareness of non-adherence and their ability to manage medication. The development of oral dosage forms that can be infrequently dosed, and therefore improve adherence rate and facilitate direct observed therapy, has been a goal for decades. We describe the first demonstration of an oral formulation that achieves >7-day gastric retention and sustained pharmacokinetics in the challenging dog model.