> There's room for skepticism.

And there's room for thinking there's water in the ocean. We have no idea whether this would work at all or how it would work at all in humans. We have one experiment in mice, which as you say can't have Alzheimer's.

This is a nice step, like developments in fusion energy. That's part of research, and let's hope and investigate it, but it's absurd to think about it as anything but a science project right now.

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reissbaker 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sadly, it's worse. We don't have one experiment that works in mice: we have dozens, if not hundreds. We've cured "Alzheimer's in mice" many times over. The treatments never work in humans, because it's not the same disease. We don't know the root cause of the human disease and so we can't model it accurately in mice.

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esperent 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We don't know the root cause of the human disease

It's increasingly likely that there is no "root cause" to find in humans, but rather, that Alzheimer's is what happens when there's enough external stressors acting on the brain.

I've seen an analogy of a leaky roof being used: the leaks are things like age, stress, heavy metals, mold, bad sleep, bad diet. Genetics defines the original building materials (resilience) of the roof. You can put buckets under a certain number of leaks but if there are too many your ability to repair gets overwhelmed and the result is diseases like dementia.

I think something similar applies to other diseases of aging like heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, perhaps even cancer.

The downside of this is that's it's hard to imagine a miracle drug being the solution. But the upside is that a combination therapy that identifies the "leaks" and works on reducing or eliminating them will likely be effective against a wide range of age related diseases.

The therapy will likely consist of drugs and supplements in combination with lifestyle changes.

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everdrive 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I totally get that people are not mice, however animals studies have been useful for all sorts of diseases. Are they really uniquely bad for Alzheimer's?

	▲	greygoo222 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To put it simply, mice don't get Alzheimer's. We're not studying mice with Alzheimer's, we're studying mice with an mutation chosen for resembling Alzheimer's. But we don't know whether this model replicates the actual mechanisms of the disease, or if it's superficial.
	▲	adinb 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No. I believe the problem is with our artificial models of Alzheimer’s in mice.

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thisislife2 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And the author of the paper has disclosed that they have patent on the drug being tested. Let's see if the results can be reproduced by others. Then let's see how it tests with humans.

	▲	15 hours ago \| parent [-]
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