Effects of galantamine on attention and memory in Alzheimer's disease measured by computerized neuropsychological tests: results of the Brazilian Multi-Center Galantamine Study (GAL-BRA-01).

Objective: To investigate the effects of galantamine on the performance of patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) in a computerized neuropsychological test battery (CNTB).

Method: Thirty-three patients with probable AD were treated with galantamine for three months and evaluated in a prospective, open-label, multi-center study. The CNTB and the ADAS-Cog were administered at baseline and after 12 weeks. The CNTB includes reaction time tests to evaluate attention, implicit and episodic memory for faces and words. Statistical comparisons were performed between the results in week 12 versus baseline. Patients who did not reach the therapeutic doses were excluded from the efficacy analysis.

Results: Four patients (12.1%) were excluded from the analysis either because of treatment discontinuation (n=3) or because a therapeutic dose was not reached (n=1). The remaining 29 patients were treated with doses of 24 mg/day (n=22) and 16 mg/day (n=7). After 12 weeks, significant reductions in reaction time were seen in the test of episodic memory for faces (p=0.023) and in the test of two-choice reaction time (p=0.039) of the CNTB.

Conclusion: Treatment with galantamine produced improvement in computerized tests of attention and episodic memory after 12 weeks, leading to statistically significant reduction in the reaction times.