Pet scan: $3000 - $4000 Peanut butter: $3 - $10 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3823377/pdf/nih...
Peanut butter is even cheaper than that -- 10 people can smell the same peanut butter but they can't fit in the same Pet scanner.
PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
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Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#32Not surprising to me. A family member just had a stroke... the entire system is designed around maximizing billing. If someone is in a longer term situation and a Alzheimer's diagnosis makes a buck, you'll get that diagnosis. Never mind the mental condition is probably a result of the institutional environment and drugs.
> the entire system is designed around maximizing billing Our entire world is built that way, it isn't unique to medicine.
Except for businesses that compete on price.
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#33So what did they have?
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#34Does that invalidate any studies on treatments for Alzheimer? If it turns out many people who show symptoms don't actually have it, it's no wonder that a treatment is so hard to find.
It reduces these studies' power to detect results. If you thought you had 100 cases and 100 controls, it turns out perhaps you really had 30 cases and 100 controls, and 70 controls misclassified as cases. Power is going to be substantially hurt.
Those 70 are not controls but each may have a different disease.
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#35Historically, a bunch of symptom-defined diseases (e.g. hepatitis, diabetes, etc) have turned out to actually be a set of different diseases with different causes, different treatments but similar symptoms - and understanding that split has been a big milestone in treating them. This now might be the case for Alzheimer's as well.
It's not much better than searching for the cure for all illness.
Drink enough, sleep enough, eat well, do some sports, meditate. If that doesn't help, good luck with going to the doctors.
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the entire system is designed around maximizing billing Our entire world is built that way, it isn't unique to medicine.
Except for businesses that compete on price.
And every business does everything it can to not have to do that, it works when there's choice and price transparency, markets fail without the right ingredients and healthcare is certainly one of the markets the free market has failed.
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#37Pet scan: $3000 - $4000 Peanut butter: $3 - $10 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3823377/pdf/nih...
> Methods: Participants with probable AD (N=18), mild cognitive impairment (MCI, N=24), other causes of dementia (OD, N=26) and matched controls (OC, N=26) were tested, with closed eyes, for their ability to detect an odor, one nostril at a time. A container of 14g of peanut butter was opened, held medially at the bottom of a 30 cm ruler, and moved up 1cm at a time during the participants’ exhale. Upon odor detection…
Tiny pilot study. Where are odds ratios? Where are the multiple measurements per patient?
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#38Anybody read the words sensitivity, specificity, or gold standard? Just because it doesn't show up on PET doesn't mean squat if PET has a low sensitivity.
So what's the gold standard of detecting Alzheimer's? (It is a rhetorical question.)
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#39I may have Alzheimer's but .. uh... at least I don't have Alzheimer's.
It's an old joke, but fitting for the title.
Re: PET scans show many Alzheimer’s patients may not actually have the disease
#40Historically, a bunch of symptom-defined diseases (e.g. hepatitis, diabetes, etc) have turned out to actually be a set of different diseases with different causes, different treatments but similar symptoms - and understanding that split has been a big milestone in treating them. This now might be the case for Alzheimer's as well.
It's not much better than searching for the cure for all illness. Drink enough, sleep enough, eat well, do some sports, meditate. If that doesn't help, good luck with going to the doctors.
> meditate
Any clinically proven benefit of meditation though? Don't throw it together with sleep and exercising...