Experimental Alzheimer's Vaccine Shows Promise in Mice | Hacker News Reader

Experimental Alzheimer's Vaccine Shows Promise in Mice

gizmodo.com

63 pointsgumby30 comments

We've cured "Alzheimer's in mice" over and over again. Sadly our mouse model for Alzheimer's has not proven to be a good model for Alzheimer's in humans.

I definitely wouldn't hold my breath on this vaccine working but it's different from the drugs targeting beta amyloid plaques and it's still possible it will work.

Even if the animal model they tested it using is suspect, the theory behind drug itself (targeting senescent cells) is plausible.

I wouldn't give it more than a 10% chance but without other effective alzheimer's drugs even a small chance like that is absolutely still worth doing clinical trials on.

They bred up a mouse that gets something that looks like Alzheimer's, and is very easy to cure it in. In the US, most of two billion dollars annually goes for grants just to study this mouse. Vanishingly few grantees ever so much as peek at anything in or from human patients. Of course there is plenty still to learn about that mouse, as about any organism, but what has been far more thoroughly demonstrated than most medical results is that, appearances aside, Alzheimer's in that mouse is very unlike in humans.

The only intervention I know of that shows robust results preventing Alzheimers is having been recently vaccinated. It doesn't seem to matter much for what, but several population studies, involving tens of thousands of patients and controlling for lifestyle confounders, show a reliable 40% reduction in dementia risk for people recently vaccinated for TDaP. Nobody will talk about it, apparently because it is embarrassing to have no clue why it works. (Pressed, people mumble about inflammation.) And, of course, no money is spent figuring it out, or figuring out why vaccination doesn't seem to help the other 60%.

Work in other countries has implicated herpes virus, and got good outcomes from valacyclovir, again provoking little interest from US researchers.

Whenever it, somehow, becomes possible to divert those two billion dollars to somewhere they might do some good for Alzheimer's patients, a whole population of biochemists who only know about brain metabolism in that mouse will need to find something else to do. In the meantime, they get to allocate the money to themselves.

> The only intervention I know of that shows robust results preventing Alzheimers is having been recently vaccinated. It doesn't seem to matter much for what, but several population studies, involving tens of thousands of patients and controlling for lifestyle confounders, show a reliable 40% reduction in dementia risk for people recently vaccinated for TDaP. Nobody will talk about it, apparently because it is embarrassing to have no clue why it works. (Pressed, people mumble about inflammation.) And, of course, no money is spent figuring it out, or figuring out why vaccination doesn't seem to help the other 60%.

Source? This sounds like a theory I would've seen here before.

This study involved 1.8 million patients:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220624123814.h...

> People who received at least one influenza vaccine were 40% less likely than their non-vaccinated peers to develop Alzheimer's disease over the course of four years, according to a new study from UTHealth Houston.

I've heard about this effect with TDAP and the Shingles vaccine. I wonder what's the mechanism.

Wow, thanks, I didn't know about this one. Going from tracking 60,000 patients in 2020 to 1,872,000 patients in 2022 is quite a jump in robustness.

This one tracked people vaccinated against flu every year, instead of (just?) TDaP. People vaccinated every year did better than those vaccinated fewer years, with the same 40% effect size. I wonder how many million people they will need to demonstrate the effect in, before any of the the mouse beta-amylase grant money gets diverted to figuring out how vaccines forestall it, and how many before any GPs start applying the (embarrassing) results.

Sci-hub doesn't have the paper, but it seems to be open-access: https://content.iospress.com/download/journal-of-alzheimers-...

This is great news for mice with Alzheimer’s

Don’t be so heartless. I’m sure there are lots of them than there are humans.

Maybe not so many mice will develop their peculiar breed's brand of Alzheimer's. It is hard to believe there can be more than 10M of those at any time. Their entire lineage could disappear in a year without continuous support, and then no mice would suffer it.

Good point, I was off by several orders of magnitude.

Clearly the most ethical thing to do is to “destroy the village in order to save it”

A good solid step. Having produced an animal analogue of Alzheimer's and now come to a vaccine against it showing basic safety and effectiveness in mice is the step towards human trials. Early yet its still years away, but hopefully another awful disease is in the process of being reduced.

The animal analogue of Alzheimer's has been very, very thoroughly demonstrated to be an entire failure for predicting the effect of interventions. Still, studying that failed analogue (to the wholesale exclusion of attention to the actual disease in humans) has been a good career path for an entire generation of biochemists. One wonders what they could pivot to when it is finally abandoned; and what would need to happen before that could be achieved. As it is, those biochemists directly control $2B in grants to themselves, and show little appetite for change.

From the article: "It’s intended to work by training the immune system to go after certain senescent cells, aging cells that no longer divide to make more of themselves, but instead stick around in the body. These cells aren’t necessarily harmful, and *some play a vital role in healing and other life functions*."

Emphasis mine. It sounds like there could be major side-effects from this vaccine, possibly undetectable in mice. It would still be interesting to see how this progresses though.

It merely slows progress of Alzheimer i.e. stops progress of brain inflammation.

Strange that they call it a vaccine.

Nomenclature aside, it's even better to not develop the inflammation in the first place.

And it can be done with a simple (but difficult) change: stop eating insane amounts of sugar and carbs that most people eat in standard American / western diet.

This prevents diabetes (because diabetes is "too much glucose in your blood" disease and not eating sugar (glucose) and carbs (are converted to glucose by our body).

Elevated levels of glucose trigger elevated levels of insulin. If it persists for long periods of time, it causes inflammation in our body, including brain.

This inflammation caused by diabetes is believed to be main cause of Alzheimer. Some scientists even call Alzheimer a Type 3 diabetes.

As to "insane amounts of sugar": you probably consume insane amount of sugar without knowing your doing it.

The optimal amount of glucose in our blood in 3 grams, which is 6 grams of sugar.

A daily recommended dose of sugar is 25 grams for women and 36 for men.

A single can of coca-cola is 33 grams of sugar. That's more than a daily sugar budget for a woman and almost daily budget for a man.

An average consumption by an American is 76.7 grams i.e. 2x daily recommended dose.

> This inflammation caused by diabetes is believed to be main cause of Alzheimer

then please don't start your comment as if this is verifiable fact

This is a real and open debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246646/

I'm glad that in the face of decades of research, you boiled avoiding Alzheimer's down to just a few paragraphs. Well done!

Medical science is just catching up to the fact that diet is the major cause of major non-pathogenic disease behind alcohol and tobacco consumption.

It's taken so long because the medical and pharmaceutical industries prefer to treat disease rather than prevent or cure it with proper nutrition, and the food industry wants to keep you addicted.

Do you have any sources documenting the link between diabetes and Alzheimer’s? This is the first I’ve heard of that.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246646/

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=diabetes+alzhei...

https://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/alzheimers-diabetes-link

You'll find numerous researches talking about this link.

eFAD (early-onset Alzheimer’s disease) runs in my wife’s family. It’s a simple Mendelian dominant genetic trait. If you get the mutated gene from your parent, you get Alzheimer’s. Not “well, you might get it”. You get it. Usually in your early to mid 50s. Her dad is in his early 60s and is in the late stages of the disease. It’s far, far more complex a disease than just “don’t eat sugar”.

eFAD is quite a distinct disease from late-onset Alzheimer's. Just like type 1 diabetes is distinct from type 2 diabetes, the latter of which is as simple as "don't eat sugar". Both types of diabetes are linked to LOAD.

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