What causes Alzheimer's? Scientists are rethinking the answer
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
"High fitness in middle age reduces the chance of dementia by ninety percent" https://www.ergo-log.com/high-fitness-in-middle-age-reduces-...
Incredible results but I think the specifics are worth using when they’re available.
Also, there is no cause and effect here, though vascular origin dementia as noted seems almost certainly to be reduced by better cardiovascular fitness, as are many other vascular issues. Having said that, vascular and arterial lining damage due to diet appears not to be resolved by exercise, and could very easily be a culprit here as well. Fitness is a great tool for general well-being, but it doesn’t appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness here.
If exercise reduced risk of dementia by 99% would you still feel compelled to point out that it "doesn't appear to be the singular cause of increased wellness"?
Where's your threshold?
We literally have the solution. What you're saying, while it is technically true, seems to be more of an excuse or justification not to exercise. Perhaps I'm reading too much into your comment.
This is something I’ve been digging deep into and discovering a lot of seemingly safe assumptions turn out not to be.
I do expect exercise is a major factor here (perhaps the largest), but I’m acutely aware lately that these things, especially where nutrition could be a significant factor, are rarely ever cut and dry. It’s incredibly complex.
I don’t mean to say people shouldn’t exercise. I should have emphasized that, without a doubt. We know beyond any shadow of doubt that it improves quality of life dramatically for virtually everyone.
The reality that just eating right, sleeping and exercising is still our best health advice is humorous and disheartening.
In university, I had an indoor track I could use, it was fantastic and had plenty of room for families and people exercising.
Apart from the mental health aspect (lack of agency, no time or space to yourself), you can’t always subject your kids to the weather of the day or they’re uncooperative to the point that the run isn’t feasible. Not to mention the multitude of reasons people can’t run, from disabilities to simply having no safe place to run with a stroller. Smooth sidewalks with space are kind of a luxury.
With a lifestyle and/or restrictions like that, no wonder people get out of shape. We can’t rely on our communities having space and accommodation for kids and so, well, without a family network we’re on our own.
I've found my health is better (physical and mental) in walkable cities than in suburbs, even though I'm not walking.
Sort of.
Physical fitness for good health has 2 components: aerobic fitness and strength. You can improve your aerobic fitness and your upper body strength at home (rings and/or handstand pushups are enough for all but the most advanced strength athletes).
Core/lower body strength is another matter entirely. People tend to quickly progress to 1x body weight squats and deadlifts. And someone who is more advanced will probably be in the 2x-3.5x range. Without access to serious weight, lower body training is usually pretty ineffective, strength wise.
Doesn't matter, 1x or even less is still 100% enough for life expectancy and general health.
You can absolutely get to 2x bw squats from home with nothing but a chair as gear.
You can't.
I assume your parent was confused about notation. You can get 1x body weight squats (that is to say your actual body + 1x your body weight as additional load) by doing one legged squats off of a chair.
I don't understand where I'm wrong about the 2x bw though?
My thesis is that disregarding upper body gains, which can be compensated by other exercises, single leg squats will get you to 1x + 1x bw, which is 2x, with almost no gear at all.
You can also reasonably easily add about 2x15kg in dumbbells which is almost another 0,7x or so, making home training quite powerful.
The disagreement is purely about notation.
In the strength world, people routinely ignore bodyweight when measuring squat intensity - they only list load weight. I suspect that this is, in large part, an effort to be consistent with other barbell exercises like Deadlift (which I mentioned earlier), Press, Bench Press, Row, etc. where including one's body weight wouldn't really make sense.
That's been my solution.
If you take into account resale value, it'll actually pay itself off much faster - especially if you're willing to wait for good deals.
I think I was able to put together a full set of weights + another set of 45s for less than $1/lb. I'm using a cheap bar and a cheap rack, so the whole thing cost me less than $800.
I estimate that I could sell it all today for $600 for sure, and probably get back all my money if I was willing to wait 1-2 months.
The other big advantage of using a home gym is wait times; I used to go to a commercial gym, where the wait time for a rack was often more than 30 minutes at peak times. As long as you don't need machines (lat pulldown can be very nice), a rack at home can make gym time much more efficient.
If a person has more money and the space, they can do the same thing with dumbbells.
It's really not complicated, but people make it so.
[ be sure to a) check for leakages regularly and b) do arm curls well away from electric outlets, just in case ]
It never occurred to him to get a cheap workout app and get active at home. Even after I told him about this option he rather kept complaining.
People are amazingly stupid sometimes...
That said, you don't need to wait to be given those opportunities. Look for every opportunity for unnecessary expenditure of energy - you'll find there are plenty.
The simple fact is that if you sabotage your body, you'll have more issues cropping up sooner and with greater severity, and if you keep it strong all that medical advancement actually has an opportunity to help you in the cases where your body can't help itself. It doesn't discredit medical advancement, only reminds us that many people's lifestyles can often be more destructive than we realize.
Others families live into their hundreds without any effort. It would seem the first thing to do is to figure out a way to fix DNA.
In 1986 exercise physiologist Kenneth Cooper published an inventory of the risk factors that might have contributed to Fixx's death.[6] Granted access to his medical records and autopsy, and after interviewing his friends and family, Cooper concluded that Fixx was genetically predisposed—his father died of a heart attack at 43 after a previous one at 35,[7] and Fixx himself had a congenitally enlarged heart—and had an unhealthy life: Fixx was a heavy smoker before beginning running at age 36, had a stressful occupation, had undergone a second divorce, and gained weight up to 214 pounds (97 kg).[8] Medical opinion continues to uphold the link between moderate exercise and longevity.[9]
Your pill would need to do a lot of heavy lifting. I'm no doctor, but your pill would need to deal with mental issues (dementia of all kinds etc) and physical issues, like muscle mass, bone density, flexibility, skin elasticity and lots more.
There are very few, dare I say no, 90 year old that could pass for 70 - what sort of condition would 120 bring? Or 130 etc?
As an expert in one field, used to customers waving their hands telling me "this won't take long for you to do, it's very simple", I feel like your belief in (medical) technology, and what is possible, may be just a touch optimistic.
There are already large mammals - bowhead whales - that can live 200 years. Perhaps we can adopt some of their longevity traits without having to become giant ocean creatures.
The frailty comes from somewhere, like depletion of certain stem cells that produce new tissue.
Technology hasn't really taken us past mid 80s. It seems plausible that it could, but that's based purely on speculation, so it could be false.
We need the proper fuel, substrates, and cofactors to operate well and not do unnecessary damage
This is also why lots of mouse longevity research doesn’t translate well to humans. Mice are not a particularly longevity optimized mammal so it means there is more low hanging fruit there.
For us all the low hanging fruit is likely picked.
I find it American culture and decades of bad city planning to be a greater harm for living healthy than most other sources of not living healthy.
Medical technology and AI is not even close to any major improvement in life expectancy, except in much rare cases (heart transplants is one example: they're insignificant in raising overall life expectancy, as they're statistically too rare to matter).
The big majority of the improvement in life expectancy in the 20th century was from low-hanging stuff like running water, sterilization, waste disposal, and basic antibiotics, not from the high-tech transplants, DNA research, fancy drugs and so on.
(1) herculean effort to make it confirm to what they have established as politically correct.
(2) improve AI.
(2) improve AI.
(3) work out how to do both at the same time.
FTFY
Wanna keep it from turning murderbot or paperclip maximizer? Welcome to the arena of politics of correct values. Wanna use it for longevity research? Same.
Some people also would like to make sure it isn't helping stoke antisemitism or genocide, but apparently that's controversial for some reason, so guess it's political.
(And that's before we get to the usual issue that people using "politically correct" as the drive-by aspersion that's so unfortunately common are usually more ideological than those they criticize and very much have their own political correctness they're anxious to impose by any means available to them...)
I gather flu vaccine has similar effect size. Nobody knows why. Ask, and people speculate about inflammation.
Having been treated for herpes lately -- valacyclovir, lately -- seems too to have outsize effect. I get all three.
People doing autopsies say brains they examine are very often laced with herpes virus and bacteria, vs. doctrine that insists nothing gets in.
US grants $2B annually to study plaque formation in transgenic mice. Approximately none of it goes for anything of value. When the amyloid boat sinks, a lot of biochemists will need to find something else to do. They would better look early.
Roughly, the sentiment was that I am young and have time to wait for more research, that taking drugs long term will itself likely have consequences. I'm not inclined to disagree there, although the evidence seems quite strong.
I look forward to seeing more funding and scientific effort directed toward other avenues.
Fancy drugs save lives. Big time. My Mom had cancer and was treated with Rituximab. She's doing just fine 10 years later. That type of cancer would have been a death sentence 30 years before. There are lots of other anti-cancer drugs like Rituximab, and they save lives every day.
Technology has solved so many problems. It's also created new ones. But we're way better off, there's no question of that.
How is it hypocritical? Opposed to any other times in human history you can’t give up on society and live a peaceful life in a community.
We’re born into it along with all our families and friends. Telling someone to go off and live in the woods is a life of solitude and probably harsh run ins with the law.
There is no choice nowadays and saying “ha but you live in society so you can’t critique it” is a willful ignorance.
Seriously, if you really believe you're better off without technology, you can live that way without going and living in the woods. Saying you're better off without technology from a smartphone is hypocrisy. I double down on that.
Also, you still have to give up all your family and friends and live by strict Christian values. Not everyone’s cup of tea, especially if one happens to be different in some way.
https://scitechdaily.com/new-pill-replicates-exercise-and-st...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/what-does-a-h...
> The Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality in observational studies. There is evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death. The American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association recommend the Mediterranean diet as a healthy dietary pattern that may reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes, respectively.
On a macro level if you want to improve your health : Less processed foods, less synthetic materials, less pharmaceuticals, less time sitting and indoors. Less alcohol, less weed, Less involvement from these "professionals" all across the board. Less, less, less. Wow, isn't that weird?
For those who will comment for arguments sake, I would rather you provide examples of the sitting President promoting overall good health practices (read: FREE) rather than his usual gaslighting the public into taking an untested pharmaceutical product.
No wonder why these are good for us, because these are our true traits.
Modern medicine, on the other hand, is a few hundred years old at best and generally work as a band-aid rather than solving the root of the problems.
Tissues that aren't stressed naturally atrophy to conserve energy, which saves on food, which is adaptive in evolutionary terms. This has the natural implication that those tissues will reach an equilibrium where they are barely stronger than your most basic needs.
If the only stress you experience is getting off the couch to get some food, just doing that will be a little difficult. Larger, sudden stresses will cause injuries because your tissues won't be adapted to handle them.
Exercise ensures that we mentally and physically exceed our normal stress thresholds, so the remaining stresses of life is less stressful by comparison.
I view exercise as giving your body, and brain, proof that the rebuilding is still needed, and information on where to direct resources.
If you never take a walk, why expect your body to rebuild itself to be good at walking? Eventually it'll lose its capacity because it (correctly) "learns" that isn't important to you.
You should be happy that it's so simple.
I mean, think of it as bodybuilding: there are plenty of good ol' ways of building strength and stimulating hypertrophy on purely natural processes, and that shouldn't be disheartening as compared to, say, injecting yourself with steroids.
RIP everyone that didn't win the normal body lottery though
The people in this thread saying we should have walkable communities are being unrealistic but I'll concede that that what they're saying is better then any idea I have.
Not to be a sourpuss but I believe that a reasonable theory on this is that physical activity, especially activity that uses brain power, causes neuronal development which reroutes function around damage, without necessarily preventing or mitigating damage itself.
I imagine people who are naturally healthier probably more fit and less demented.
One area I'm particularly interested in is the correlation to diabetes. It's a factor that I found being mentioned here and there in some references. In the immediate case that interests me, there's a 20+ year history of type 2 diabetes and a recent scan showed severe bilateral hypocampal atrophy. When googling for a link between the two I found this: "Lower insulin secretion was significantly associated with HPGA (hippocampal and parahippocampal gyrus atrophy) in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The results of this study support the hypothesis that insulin‐signaling abnormalities are involved in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8504906/
Yet, the mechanism of this, if indeed there's causality (not just correlation) does not seem to be known.
Interesting to find out it has it's own wiki page
Sugar.
I think the correlation is more so to sugar.
I too had a loved one with Alzheimer’s, and there was definitely strong reason to believe sugar was a contributing factor.
... just kidding they all work together
In the past I have eaten a fruitarian diet to fuel my workouts. And sometimes I consumed pure sugar.
I believe there are quite a few scientists that agree with you. Some are trying to rename Alzheimer's to Type-3 diabetes. There are some articles sprinkled throughout nih.gov PubMed on this topic.
https://www.alz.org/media/Documents/alzheimers-dementia-diab...
>Overall, a growing body of evidence supports the nine potentially modifiable risk factors for dementia modelled by the 2017 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention, and care: less education, hypertension, hearing impairment, smoking, obesity, depression, physical inactivity, diabetes, and low social contact.
[0] Full report from July 2020 issue of The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
https://www.virtahealth.com/research
It's unknown whether that would reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease. Worth a try anyways.
Look into supporting mitochondria health [0] and the glymphatic system [1]: good diet (with fasting), light to moderate exercise, sleep and wake at the same time each day for circadian rhythm training, reduce unnecessary stress.
Once the basics have been implemented, some supplements could help to further support cell function if needed: Longevity supplements that Dr David Sinclair takes [2], boosting cellular glutathione stores, with NACET, glycine, selenium [3]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4684129/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7698404/ [2] https://novoslabs.com/best-anti-aging-supplements-that-harva... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889054/
One nurse once told me that there's a connection between the decline and another medication - one for reflux, pantoprazol or so.
If the connection is via diabetes, a low carb/no carb diet might help - if someone else is cooking the food that should be easy. God's speed!
EMPHASIS: 1972! 50 years ago.
And processed foods is everywhere. And people are wondering why we have diabetes and possibly brain diabetes that is Alzheimer's.
> The most influential Cassava-related paper appeared in The Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2012. The authors—including Wang; Arnold; David Bennett, who leads a brain-tissue bank at Rush University; and his Rush colleague, neuroscientist Zoe Arvanitakis—linked insulin resistance to Alzheimer’s and the formation of amyloid plaques. Cassava scientists say Simufilam lessens insulin resistance. They relied on a method in which dead brain tissue, frozen for a decade and then partially thawed and chopped, purportedly generates chemical signals.
> Schrag and others say it contradicts basic neurobiology. Schrag adds that he could find no evidence that other investigators have replicated that result. (None of the authors agreed to be interviewed for this article.)
> That paper supported the science behind Simufilam, Schrag says, “and spawned an entire field of research in Alzheimer’s, ‘diabetes of the brain.’” It has been cited more than 1500 times. Schrag sent the journal’s editor his analysis of more than 15 suspect images in two groups. The editor says the journal analyzed high-resolution versions of the images in the first group. It could not corroborate his findings and therefore did not investigate further.
I think the problem then is...if you have some promising directions from preliminary work, to test an idea in clinical trials, it is not cheap. You have to hire a large army of clinicians, nurses, research people, etc etc to manage all the patients/subjects x 10,000 or 50,000. So there has to be at least some politicking to steer where all the research funds go to. And people who are better at "finessing" scientific review boards tend to bubble to the top
If the fundamental problem is misallocation of research dollars, then that's what should be tackled first. I'd vote to do something like a git bisect and isolate the failures first. The scale of the failures suggests that the problems go back to the beginning. So I'd start by halving the funds that go to the big players and distributing the remainder amongst smaller groups and individuals trying a wide array of different approaches.
That said, I'd predict that as theory and simulation improve, especially in areas like big data, machine learning and AI, strong correlations will be found soon (probably within 5 years, certainly 10). They'll probably discover something that the article hints at, that the problem is actually inside cells and that the amyloid protein is a symptom (not a cause). It's probably something like a subtance in food confusing the immune system or a multi-cause effect related to living a lifetime under acute stress far above and beyond what we'd encounter while living in a hunter-gatherer society, or simply that we get no exercise compared to what our bodies evolved for so maybe the cellular repair mechanisms generated by our muscles aren't there to repair the nervous system (no blame here - it's hard for older folks to get enough exercise when they're hurting).
All wild speculation on my part as a computer geek who doesn't know the first thing about medicine, I'm the first to admit!
It just have a longer life than normal ponzi schemes, but ends up in the same way in about 20-40 years.
The thing is, the beta amyloid theory was the only explanation for Alzheimer's that would allow treatments to be developed right now.
Tons of people want treatments asap.
While it makes no sense to develop treatments based on this theory if they definitely won't work, when it looks like there's an 80% chance of the theory being wrong, 100% of drug companies' Alzheimer's drug development money is still going to go to drugs based on this theory because we have nothing else except vague hypotheses with no drug targets.
So actually part of the problem is that so many people are incentivized to keep sticking to this theory and someone needs to step in and stop it.
In any case the whole amyloid system is involved somehow, I think that much is very likely. Just not in the way that the visible amyloid fibers are the cause, but might just be another symptom. This is not anything like heretical talk, this suspicion was pretty much mainstream when I studied biochemistry ~15 years ago. It was only a hypothesis, but it certainly wasn't suppressed.
But "monolithic thinking" is also accepting established theory. Unlimited diversity can open the door to all sorts of crap - I don't want "diversity" in whether a doctor accepts the germ theory of (some) disease, the existence of viruses, etc.
That might be part of it. I think a bigger part is, "we don't know what X is so we can't measure it, but Y seems to coincide with X and we can measure Y, so let's focus on Y".
This probably happens a lot and sometimes it works out, but it also often doesn't. It failed with dietary cholesterol, and Alzheimer's is the just the latest big failure of this approach.
There's a follow-up study on the herpes angle currently in progress (https://www.alzheimers.gov/clinical-trials/valacyclovir-mild...) after this one (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13311-018-0611-x) in Taiwan, for instance.
No one should accept this as an excuse. They weren't rational, they chased the shiny.
I'm not sure "visibility bias" already has the right meaning, but if not we need a term for this pervasive problem where people just choose to not believe or otherwise ignore factors that don't leap out to them, even if they're just as if not more important in reality. More abstractly we see it with Alzheimer's hypotheses here: Hypotheses with greater uncertainty suffer the same treatment, where not having as clear an idea about what it is causes it to be entirely discounted, for years, in favor of the clearer action plan.
(Yes, I am aware that some of the research is possibly fraud, other avenues of investigation have been suppressed, etc. I've read quite a few articles about Alzheimer's, my late father had Alzheimer's and ...etc.)
And as people get older, they tend to both sleep less and also sleep less deeply.
The technology we're developing at https://soundmind.co is supporting an Alzheimer's prevention trial beginning in January '23 which is looking at the impact of slow-wave enhancement in the clearing of Amyloid plaques.
The older you get, the more likely you are to get Alzheimer's. Young people don't get Alzheimer's (with the exception of early onset, which is still in an older population).
So if we extend life long enough, will everyone get it?
Unlikely. Just like not everyone with high cholesterol develop heart disease. However the older we get, the worse sleep gets, the more build up of amyloids, the more likely a person is to develop Alzheimer's.
Part of the reason the amyloid theory is in question is because there are people with significant build up of amyloid who do not develop Alzheimer's and there are people with little amyloid build up who do generate Alzheimer's.
[1] https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-causes-alzheimers-diseas....
Even if there is no other health issue, SWS declines with age. The decline of SWS is linked to increased amyloids, which is linked to Alzheimer's.
Yes, apnea also has an impact on SWS, with the same relationship to amyloids and Alzheimer's, but solving the apnea does not solve the age related decline.
How a newly discovered body part changes our understanding of the brain (and the immune system) (2016)
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2016/how-a-newly-discover...
Edit: Ah, yes. I thought it sounded familiar: Previously discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25426185
Brain’s lymphatic system, just recently discovered, now linked to aging and Alzheimer’s (2018)
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/brain-s-recently-disc...
Edit: Quote from the above linked piece:
“As you age, the fluid movement in your brain slows, sometimes to a pace that’s half of what it was when you were younger...We discovered that the proteins responsible for Alzheimer’s actually do get drained through these lymphatic vessels in the brain along with other cellular debris, so any decrease in flow is going to affect that protein build-up.”
Lymphatic Vessels Discovered in Central Nervous System (2015)
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphat...
Brain cleaning system uses lymphatic vessels (2017)
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/brain-c...
I agree that all directions should be explored. I wonder if there's already a database of Alzheimer patients that includes sleep quality measurements?
Cancer ALS Alzheimer Diabetes Covid AIDS
?
source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
But, even if you call it a cultural issue, it is still a health issue. It causes billions in additional care, shortens lifespans, is a risk factor for many other diseases. Those facts alone make it a medical problem.
> As someone who has a close relative diagnosed with this disease, I'm always on the lookout for new information. So this is interesting.
AD is, sadly, rather common, as well as a really devastating disease: you can do nothing but watch as your loved ones become shells of themselves in front of your eyes. You can consider yourself lucky for not having gone through it personally.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lost relatives to it. It just seems overrepresented vs, say, cancers. But it might just be my impression.
Besides the emotional side, AD is more of a single entity than all of cancer, as well as really costly in terms of hospice etc so financially the research is much more viable. The mystery of the mind as well as the state of the art are also a lot easier to get clicks with than “new crazy expensive drug marginally increases the prognosis of one specific type of cancer”, so the latter’s smaller breakthroughs don’t get as much publicity.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
“Deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias have increased, overtaking stroke to become the second leading cause in high-income countries, and being responsible for the deaths of 814 000 people in 2019.”
And given the nominally cerebral bent of this forum: kinda makes sense we’re freaking out about our brains throwing a kernel panic someday.
I would rather have AIDS and Ebola at the same time than Alzheimers.
Because that has a more direct emotional affect on those around them, it gives people a stronger desire to want to eradicate it.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/23/alzheimers-s...
"The hypothesis took another hit last July when a bombshell article in Science revealed that data in the influential 2006 Nature paper linking amyloid plaques to cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease may have been fabricated. The connection claimed by the paper had convinced many researchers to keep pursuing amyloid theories at the time. For many of them, the new exposé created a “big dent” in the amyloid theory, Patira said."
Most recent one I saw is this one that I think is funded by the Norwegian government
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/9/e056964
Then there's startups like Alkahest https://www.alkahest.com/pipeline/akst-grf6019/
Clinical trials of sorts has been going on since at least 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22930
That being said, thanks for the links. I read them all.
Here is the results of the Phase II from Alkahest. Not a game changer thus far. https://www.alzforum.org/therapeutics/grf6019
"... mild hearing loss doubled dementia risk. Moderate loss tripled risk, and people with a severe hearing impairment were five times more likely to develop dementia".
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...
It's akin to me saying that if you eat one cheeseburger every day for your whole life, you'll not get dementia. Then when you don't get dementia in the next 10 years, say that it shows what I'm saying must have had some validity behind it.
... with that all being said, my mother has early onset Alzheimer's disease (hardly over 60), and getting her on any mitigative attempts like elucidated by Bredesen is effectively impossible. She's still independent enough to live and do most things on her own, but injecting new habits has proven really challenging, as apathy is one of the most pervasive symptoms of the disease. She also had years of obstructive sleep apnea that she refused to treat, as she hated the CPAP machine.
Sure, Breseden is likely a bit of a scam artist, and it's very unlikely his protocol reverses the illness as he claims, but his ideas piecemeal are hardly "unproven" as elucidated by folks here. I think it's very unlikely that Alzheimer's finds a "cure" in a pill or some easy treatment--it seems like it's a disease that emerges after years of dysfunction, potentially from many causes, and you can't rebuild Rome overnight. I'd guess that the future of Alzheimer's research will be in prevention.
Not because I'm lazy and can't read long articles anymore (omg the attention span of young people!). Having worked in this field, I'd love to skim and find out whether there's any new information here I'm not aware of without going to filler paragraphs starting with "in a sunny afternoon in August".
Decreased proteins, not amyloid plaques, tied to Alzheimer's disease - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33096228 - Oct 2022 (3 comments)
A Positive Amyloid Trial, Finally? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010078 - Sept 2022 (49 comments)
Faked Beta-Amyloid Data. What Does It Mean? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32224823 - July 2022 (168 comments)
Two decades of Alzheimer’s research was based on deliberate fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32212719 - July 2022 (298 comments)
Potential fabrication in research threatens the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183302 - July 2022 (256 comments)
Alzheimer’s amyloid hypothesis ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31828509 - June 2022 (307 comments)
Tau PET imaging beats amyloid-based approach in battle against Alzheimer’s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21970903 - Jan 2020 (15 comments)
How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225 - Dec 2019 (382 comments)
Robert Moir, 58, Dies; His Research Changed Views on Alzheimer’s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859212 - Dec 2019 (3 comments)
Why Do We Keep Investing in Anti-Amyloid Therapies for Alzheimer’s Disease? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496402 - March 2019 (1 comment)
Alzheimer’s Drug Failure Leaves Scientists Seeking New Direction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19468987 - March 2019 (76 comments)
Scientists discover why many Alzheimer’s drugs fail, identify one that may work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18030200 - Sept 2018 (9 comments)
The amyloid hypothesis on trial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618027 - July 2018 (43 comments)
Is the Alzheimer's “Amyloid Hypothesis” Wrong? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17444214 - July 2018 (109 comments)
Researcher says we have Alzheimer's wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9509808 - May 2015 (27 comments)
An Outcast Among Peers Gains Traction on Alzheimer's Cure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4766983 - Nov 2012 (11 comments)
It’s research not engineering and we can’t experiment on people. Huge unmet market need will keep companies trying.
Eat a ketogenic diet and you don't have to worry about Alzheimers.
After decades of research focused on the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which claims that sticky plaques of amyloid-beta proteins between neurons are the main cause of Alzheimer's disease, many scientists are now turning their attention to deeper dysfunctions happening within cells. Some believe that the disease is caused by a variety of proteins that may be causing multiple cell dysfunctions, while others are focusing on the role of tau protein tangles, which also form inside neurons.
I think we'll find there are many types of Alzheimer's, some Amyloid based, others viral, or dietary, etc.
Perhaps there are some kinds of prions, or other, maybe similar, infectious agents, we haven't isolated yet.