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Comment by dwroberts | Hacker News Reader

Firstly it’s not curing anything, it’s yielding some improvement. But secondly: what surgeries are performed on people with Alzheimer’s disease, let alone ones where cognitive improvement is even going to be monitored or noticed afterwards? (and even if it were noticed: periods of lucidity are not rare. It would probably be ignored)

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> Firstly it’s not curing anything, it’s yielding some improvement

It did cure some people, it yielded some improvements on average but it did yield extreme improvements in some people. That part isn't controversial.

> (and even if it were noticed: periods of lucidity are not rare. It would probably be ignored)

A year of being able to walk and talk normally when a patient could barely function at all would be noticed for sure.

> It did cure some people

Cure has a very specific definition. I don't think it applies here.

It would indicate that there is a circulatory issue in general that causes this. If so, there may be other blockages as well, at various other lymph nodes that connect to the brain, which would explain why it works better for some and not others. If you have multiple blockages this may only offer partial relief. As for what causes the blockages, my suspicion would be microplastics.

Cure means permanent. If the extreme improvements are temporary (yet to be seen) its not a cure.

It seems like you're arguing with this guy for the sake of argument. If anesthetics "yielded some improvement" in Alzheimer's temporarily then any surgery would get the same effect and we would already know about it. And what is the second point you are trying to make here - that zero surgeries are ever performed annually on Alzheimer's patients for any reason? And of the ones that are, the family wouldn't notice the dramatic cognitive improvement shown in this article, but they noticed it here?

I was not trying to say anaesthetics are actually the cure, it’s an example of the kind of elimination that has to be done to prove something is actually effective.

Look up how double blind tests are done on things that involve surgeries (eg implants)

> And of the ones that are, the family wouldn't notice the dramatic cognitive improvement shown in this article, but they noticed it here?

Because they’re primed to look for that improvement because they’re told that is the expected outcome

I agree. Very likely to be brushed off as "you're having a good day today" unless you are looking for it.

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