FDA approves Alzheimer’s treatment Whatever your age now, you’ll be old sooner than you’d like. Old age carries risks. Joints wear out and bones get brittle. Live long enough and cancers of various kinds may catch up with you. Cancer claimed Joel Siberman, a media trainer and friend, one of progressives’ brightest lights, five years ago. But perhaps the most frightening of scaries is mental decline. Particularly from Alzheimer’s. Watching it claim the mind of someone you love is tragic enough. For the first time, the FDA has approved a medication for Alzheimer’s. Not a cure, but a drug shown to “modestly” slow the disease in its early stages (Associated Press): U.S. officials granted full approval to a closely watched Alzheimer’s drug on Thursday, clearing the way for Medicare and other insurance plans to begin covering the treatment for people with the brain-robbing disease. The Food and Drug Administration endorsed the IV drug, Leqembi, for patients with mild dementia and other symptoms caused by early Alzheimer’s disease. It’s the first medicine that’s been convincingly shown to modestly slow the cognitive decline caused by Alzheimer’s. Japanese drugmaker Eisai received conditional approval from the FDA in January based on early results suggesting Leqembi worked by clearing a sticky brain plaque linked to the disease. The FDA confirmed those results by reviewing data from a larger, 1,800-patient study in which the drug slowed memory and thinking decline by about five months in those who got the treatment, compared to those who got a dummy drug. Five months?…