Alzheimer's trial results lend momentum to strategies targeting tau | Hacker News Reader

Alzheimer's trial results lend momentum to strategies targeting tau

science.org

Lowers the protein and achieves 26% slowing of decline but unexpected decreasing cognitive benefits at higher dosage

Because it’s cleaning up a symptom of Alzheimer’s (and other conditions where infections cause poor waste clearing/excess waste creation),

not reversing some known mechanism of Alzheimer’s.

If it’s waste to be cleared then a plateau would be the default assumption. Degradation past a point suggests something else.

That the medication is additional burden on already overwhelmed detoxification processes?

My best guess.

It could be a burden. Another intriguing possibility is that the waste isn't waste, instead maybe something necessary to trigger or run some other form of protective process.

I wanna see some combined treatment of drugs which have shown marginal effects in trials.

Eg. Combine the most promising 50 drugs, each at super low doses.

Low enough that side effects probably won't be bad, and if some prove entirely ineffective it doesn't matter.

But then, deliberately don't mix the ingredients precisely. Some people will get 10% more or less of each ingredient at random. Make precise records of this.

Now you have a natural experiment. Gradually increase dosage of elements that prove effective, and decrease ingredients which prove counterproductive - and you'll have a huge dataset with tens of millions of people wanting dementia treatment.

Unless you're talking about trials with millions of participants, what you'll actually get is just noise.

And probably a lot of death or maiming from drug interactions.

Which would also make it harder to get the couple million people to start with.

Edit: According to Claude you're actually talking more like several hundred million patients, i.e. more Alzheimer's patients than exist, to detect a single ingredient's effect.

Considering that regular supermarket foodstuffs contain hundreds of thousands of substances, most having no effect, but some harmful and others helpful, and people eat different diets fairly randomly, we are already doing this experiment, we just aren't collecting the results.

Well no, you're proposing a cocktail of known-active compounds, presumably injected directly into a person's bloodstream.

With regard to the food supply, actually if there's anything we are collecting, it's the results (health outcomes). The bigger problem is the same problem as your proposed experiment: we aren't controlling the inputs, and so the results are entirely noise.

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