[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resi...
There are lots of good reasons to believe in the amyloid hypothesis, and no paper or even line of research is the one bedrock of the hypothesis. It was the foundational bedrock of Alzheimer's research back in the early 1990s (essentially, before Alzheimer's became one of the holy grail quests of modern medicine), after all; well before any of the fraudulent research into Alzheimer's was done.
The main good reason not to believe in amyloid is that every drug targeting amyloid plaques has failed to even slow Alzheimer's, even when they do impressive jobs in clearing out plaques--and that is a hell of a good reason to doubt the hypothesis. But no one is going to discover that failure until you have amyloid blockers read out their phase III clinical trial results, and that doesn't really happen until about a decade ago.
Lecanemab and donanemab succeeded in slowing Alzheimer’s.
As did gantenerumab in a recent prevention trial: https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/plaque-removal-d...
Right, monocausal explanations in-general will set-off my skept-o-sense too; but then my mind made me think of another example: Andrew Wakefield (except that AW succeeded more at convincing Facebook-moms than the scientific establishment - but still harmed society just as much, IMO)
I 100% agree with you that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one. Data being falsified and the hypothesis being wrong are two different things.
The internet is awash in random garbage and it'd be interesting to have a link that someone who actually sees sleep EEGs thinks is "80% there".
Re: Link, just to lower your load in answering.
Amyloid deposits correlate with Alzheimer’s, but they do not cause the symptoms. We know this because we have drugs which (in some patients, not approved for general use) completely clear out amyloids, but have no affect on symptoms or outcomes. We have other very promising medications that do nothing to amyloids. We also have tons of people who have had brain autopsies for other reasons and found to have very high levels of amyloid deposits, but no symptoms of dementia prior to death.
Alzheimer’s isn’t caused by amyloids.
Anyone who believes that an entire field and decades of researched pivoted entirely around one researcher falsifying data is oversimplifying. The situation was not good, but it’s silly to act like it all came down to this one person and that there wasn’t anything else the industry was using as their basis for allocating research bets.