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Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

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Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#331

Post by red-iron-pine »

yxhuvud wrote: post #212
verisimi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pharma’s burned billions chasing this as it’s possibly the biggest market imaginable. To be clearer, Pharma is chasing a nice long treatment plan, that will require expensive drugs till the end. Pharma does not heal - this is not good for business. So there are criteria around what they are searching for.

They want something that actually works, foremost. If the thing they sell doesn't work, then when someone figures out something that does work the thing that works will be preferred by the doctors.

to put a finer point on it, to be able to gouge sick and slowly-going-crazy people for lots of money you have to have something that actually solves the problem.

can't mark-up snake oil, not in ways to shift the stock price for Fortune 100 tier companies -- too many lawsuits and visibility

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#332

Post by red-iron-pine »

yxhuvud wrote: post #213
defrost wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember a year or two ago when it was thought that measles was cured in the USofA? Halcyon days.

There is a cure though. What is happening is just that people are too stupid to use it.

agit-prop works, and the rube demographic is only growing larger because of it

see also: right wing grift

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#333

Post by hackeraccount »

jhedwards wrote: post #193
bradley13 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty clearly not. It would seem that beta amyloids correlate with Alzheimer's, but do not cause it. The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding to research beta amyloids, but not to research any competing hypotheses. It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.

> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative:…

The analogy isn't a perfect one.

For Climate Change it's a question of opportunity costs. With expected inputs how much will temperature change? What are the effects of that change? How much effort to you put into changing the inputs? How much effort do you put into dealing with the effects?

The biggest difference is that Climate Change is a deeply political question with a bit of science tossed in. Alzheimer's is the mirror opposite - it's a scientific question with politics added to the same degree of most other things.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#334

Post by iwalton3 »

wonnage wrote: post #83
iwalton3 wrote: post #48

I have a kind of outlandish hypothesis that needs more research before it can be taken seriously, but it basically says that the cause and effect are backwards. Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first. The sleep down regulation and decay of mental circuitry comes after. Would explain why treating the physical symptoms doesn't work. Protective against the prob…

This isn’t a hypothesis, it’s a wild unsubstantiated guess

A hypothesis is an unverified tentative insight into something which could be true. Current research is correlating dementia with a wide variety of areas including even personality typologies which are nothing more than statistical clusters of observations.

What I did when I stated this is looked at a number of observations from current literature and asked a what-if question. People unwilling to ask these questions are blinding themselves to entire areas of possible explanations. My hope when posting this was that people might engage with the idea instead of calling it a guess. Retirement, isolation from pandemic lockdowns, isolation from solitary imprisonment, and isolation from death of a partner are all associated with cognitive decline.

There's enough correlation here that it would be worth researching. That's all I am saying, I am specifically not saying my claim is factual just that it is a possible explanation that if true would explain a lot.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#335

Post by iwalton3 »

tempest_ wrote: post #50
iwalton3 wrote: post #48

I have a kind of outlandish hypothesis that needs more research before it can be taken seriously, but it basically says that the cause and effect are backwards. Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first. The sleep down regulation and decay of mental circuitry comes after. Would explain why treating the physical symptoms doesn't work. Protective against the prob…

> Mental atrophy due to less learning/thinking, isolation, loss of meaning and purpose happens first. Except early onset Alzheimers happens and it also happens to plenty of people for which none of those are true.

I mentioned this could be a possible falsification of the idea. It's also possible there are multiple causes and the modality I mentioned is a cause for some. I'm not sure. There are definitely cases where isolation contributes to cognitive decline.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#336

Post by ch4s3 »

culi wrote: post #312
ch4s3 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't. There's little evidence this drug works beyond some small studies done in Cuba by the people who developed the drug. The sum total of medical tourism to Cuba is quite small, no more than about 10k people per year. This is large due to their healthcare system lacking basic supplies like gauze and aspirin. Belly of the Beast isn't a real news outlet, its propaganda.

What is "a lot" of tourism is arbitrary but Cuba is obviously one of the most commonly talked about medical tourist destinations. Despite being strangled by the longest running US embargo (66 years) they managed to make a remarkable and free healthcare system. According to the World Bank and WHO they have the most doctors per capita of any country. Anyone that's worked in international crises is well aware of Cuba's…

> but Cuba is obviously one of the most commonly talked about medical tourist destinations.

No it isn't, and not by a long shot. The vast majority of medical tourists to Cuba are from the Caribbean, virtually no one else goes there for medical care. If you have money to travel for healthcare there are tons of better options, and most countries with national systems have VASTY superior facilities.

> Despite being strangled by the longest running US embargo

The US embargo which I don't support doesn't cover medical or agricultural goods. The Cubans received free oil and equipment from the USSR then Venezuela, and still couldn't manage to maintain any infrastructure. They can trade with any companies that aren't US based, and do. Their largest trade partners are Spain, and for agricultural goods the US. However the country is so badly managed and corrupt that they've turned all of that free oil, industrial equipment, and expertise into abject failure.

> remarkable and free healthcare system.

It's actually dog shit, and their own government admits that its plagued by shortages[1][2]. I personally have known several people who go there to perform free eye surgeries and have to bring their own equipment because the Cuban system doesn't have any.

> Anyone that's worked in international crises is well aware of Cuba's army of doctor

The UN has called this slave labor[3] on several occasions, and many people I've talked to who have worked with MSF and otehr international medical aid orgs all say the Cuban doctors are so poorly trained as to be dangerous to patients. The lack of materials in Cuba means they never get hands on experience with vital techniques.

Get out of here with this Hassan Piker bullshit.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-14/we-are-d...

[2] https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cuba...

[3]https://www.prisonersdefenders.org/2020/01/08/united-nations...

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#337

Post by totierne2 »

totierne2 wrote: post #113
Mistletoe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My spreadsheet says it makes me feel incredibly sleepy.

I took lithium for it got to my kidneys never thought of more generally microdosing lithium. Interesting. Full dose yeah flat and sleepy. Not sure it was the reason for flat out brain rot. (Other factors were available maybe just getting older.) Full dose needs blood tests as overdose weirdly bad. From due to dehydration / holiday in the sun looked like almost drunk but not drinking slopy etc. Slightly clingy despara…

Ok got minus 2 for that gotta rant elsewhere.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#338

Post by larkost »

Yizahi wrote: post #327
tastyfreeze wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah! What do you call the cap and trade group? The whole trillion dollar "carbon credit market" is a farce built to profit from climate change catastrophism.

You are mistaking the beneficiaries here. Carbon credit scheme is indeed a greenwashing scam and it is pushed by the oil and gas (plus adjacent) industries. It is plainly obvious that shuffling emissions between jurisdictions does jack shit against reducing the actual real amount of emissions to the atmosphere. Basically the main proponents of the carbon credit fraud are the same people financially motivated to rejec…

If cap-and-trade held the same levels forever you would be correct. But all of the cap-and-trade systems I am aware of have a built-in lowering of the cap over time. So they start out doing nothing/very little, then ramp up to meaningful reductions over time.

The idea being both to make it easy to get people to agree today (the reductions are tomorrow's problem), and to allow time (and foresight) for industry to adapt to where things are going.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#339

Post by zosima »

pcrh wrote: post #322
zosima wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder. Because if that was the question, why would they include anti-amyloid treatments that were never approved and are not part of any current treatment regimen and dilute the real effect of the approved antibodies? (Not that the approved antibodies are a silver bullet, but clearly they have some positive effect.)

The Cochrane review did not ask the question of whether Lecanemab (for example) worked, it asked the more general question of whether targeting amyloid worked. If targeting amyloid, generally, worked you might expect all approaches to targeting amyloid to show some efficacy. So they included all those for which clinical trials had been conducted. Obviously some treatments didn't pass the threshold required and so wer…

Yes, the new anti-amyloids are not a revolutionary therapy. But they do have a small but definite effect on disease-progression. (something which in a highly noisy indication like Alzheimer's may actually mean a lot more to the patients than it seems by looking at the data. E.g. donepezil and memantine have very modest effects too, but patients and caregivers are still surprisingly positive about them).

And since these were developed using different methods and epitopes, it does not make sense to pool them together when doing a comparison. It's obvious that if you combine modestly beneficial compounds and compounds with zero beneficial effect then the mean effect will be worse than the modestly beneficial compounds.

And when you do so just because they were aimed at the same molecular target, not even considering if anyone claims that the old, unapproved antibody-therapies, with no positive studies to support them, have any effect, what you are doing is somewhere between extreme ignorance and deception.

Re: Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

#340

Post by deepsun »

jvanderbot wrote: post #233
deepsun wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don’t know all of the details of human biology. Tautology statement. "We don't know all the details of X" for any X.

That is not a tautology. But you're right it's trivially true.

> In logic and mathematics, it is a statement that is true in every possible interpretation or situation.
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