A new drug to treat Alzheimer's disease has been approved by Health Canada. It doesn't cure the disease, but it can slow down its effects, giving patients more mental clarity.

The drug goes under the generic name memantine, and will be sold under the brand name Ebixa. It was discovered in Germany almost a decade ago and has been used in the United States for the last several years.

Ebixa will be available to Canadians next week. But some patients in Canada have already tried it.

Don Kirkpatrick has been helping his wife Claudia, an Alzheimer's patient, take Ebixa for the past six months.

"From the first day, her eyes popped open and were much clearer," he says. "She remembered my name, clearly, and for the past several years she hasn't been able to remember who I was."

Claudia was given the drug when her condition began to deteriorate. It gave her husband something he thought he'd lost.

"It gave me a chance to say some of the things I didn't get a chance to say. Before, she was unable to understand them," Kirkpatrick said. "And, it gave her the chance to say some of the things that she wanted to say."

But Montreal neurobiologist Dr. Serge Gauthier warns Alzheimer's patients that this is not a cure. "It's an important medication to control some of the symptoms in the middle stages of the disease," he said.

While he and other doctors still aren't sure why the drug seems to work better on people in more advanced stages of the disease, Gauthier says Ebixa offers patients something we've never seen before.

"It improves the brain function by reducing the noise caused by too much of one transmitter, it blocks the excessive effect of one chemical in the brain," Gauthier said.

Ebixa is being distributed by Lundbeck Canada. It will hit pharmacies next week, and the company says it will be affordable.

"The treatment per day will be kept very low, less than five dollars a day," Lundbeck Canada's spokesperson Michel Rousseau. "We want to make this product available to the most Canadians possible."

For Don Kirkpatrick, the Health Canada approval is good news. He says Ebixa has already changed his life for the better, and he's grateful that more Canadians will be able to experience the benefits themselves.

"It was like a golden opportunity of irreplaceable moments," he said.

It's estimated that about 238,000 Canadians suffer from Alzheimer's disease. The degenerative neurological illness causes brain cells to shrink or disappear, to be replaced by plaques.

Alzheimer's disease affects an individual's ability to think, remember, understand and make decisions. Eventually, the sufferer's independence disappears.

With files from CFCF's Tarah Schwartz