Fifteen Seconds at the Kitchen Table

The FDA approved a version of lecanemab that starts at home: two shots from an autoinjector, about fifteen seconds each, once a week. Until now the drug meant an infusion chair. A drive, a parking garage, an afternoon, every other week, arranged by whoever holds the family calendar.

The medicine did not change. The evidence is the same modest slowing it was last month, the brain-swelling risk still carries a boxed warning, and the MRI monitoring schedule is untouched. Anyone deciding whether to start this drug should weigh exactly what they weighed before.

What changed is the errand, and for families the errand was a real fraction of the cost. Infusion day is not an hour; it is a day. It is time off work for the person who drives, disorientation for the person in the chair, and a calendar that bends around a recurring appointment for as long as treatment lasts. Moving that to fifteen seconds at the kitchen table does not make the drug work better. It makes the treatment survivable for the household running it.

For the caregiver, the question was never only does it work. It was can we keep doing this. Starting in late August, that second question has a different answer.