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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The part of these sort of conversations that makes me wary is this understanding that "Alzheimer's" is a disease with a single cause. I think it is beyond question that some viruses trigger Alzheimer's, because viruses can do pretty much anything. The real question that they're studying is to what extent do viruses cause Alzheimer's. If it turns out that most Alzheimer's cases are a Herpes symptom then that sounds big.

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I agree, it is very frustrating. I will say that the reason they have not found a cause and/or cure for Alzheimer's is that it is a polygenic and polyenvironmental disease. The only way to cure Alzheimer's is to look at each person individually (personalized medicine) but that is expensive and not as profitable.

So then "curing Alzheimer's" is akin to "curing cancer". If this is true, I wish this truth was better disseminated.

Is the theory now that Alzheimer's just actual brain rot, of which their are multiple causes, and that beta amyloid plaques are just detritus of a losing battle?

Some researchers think Alzheimer's is a man made disease.

The last time I read up on this it was basically that we all have some predetermined risk of developing an Alzheimer's type disease, but that modern environmental variables raise that risk to such a high likelihood that it's become something it never used to be.

Interesting to think about.

> , but that modern environmental variables raise that risk to such a high likelihood that it's become something it never used to be.

Well, yeah, because more people get old enough to get it.

We have built a rather large toolset for detecting and treating a range of cancer variants over the last decades. With meaningful changes in expected outcomes. Considerable drop in mortality, for example. Far from cured though. Alzheimer's might be much trickier. ..

I’m guessing it’s trickier because it’s harder to get biopsies of the brain mid treatment. It doesn’t help that it’s been treated as one disease and assuming a single cause for so long

Do you have know of any individualized Alzheimers treatments resulted in the cure, slowing down, or "stopped further damage"? That would seem like big news, even if it was only in a person or two.

The way I've looked at it (and I work in the adjacent space of neurotech/sleeptech) is that it is likely we are assigning multiple diseases with the label of Alzheimer's because we don't understand the disease well enough.

I wouldn't say the question should be "to what extent do viruses cause Alzheimer's". I mean you could run a regression analysis to find that and then what?

The real question is what is going on and how do we fix it?

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