To be honest, even if the drug does occasionally kill people and doesn't always work, it will still be worth it for people. Once you get Alzheimer's, you, as a person, basically die anyway and you get replaced by someone who is often cruel or violent towards your loved ones, while you waste away for years.

If given the choice to suffer through that or take a potential treatment that might kill me quickly instead, I would take the treatment. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease.

Alzheimer’s is already a death sentence.

They estimate ~19 more months of independent life with this drug.

Don’t know anyone who wouldn’t take that.

I don't feel like that's a fair characterization.

Having an effective agent for Alzheimer's, even if insufficiently effective, cracks the door open to better understanding what processes are actually crucial to Alzheimer's symptoms and which are incidental.

There have been many theories about the cause of Alzheimer's. Even though this isn't a breakthrough for anyone suffering today, this is a huge breakthrough for future research.

So, forget it, then.

It doesn’t do anything… so for yrs we’ve noted increased amyloid plaque buildup with Alzheimer’s. And so there was a line of reasoning (widely accepted) suggesting the buildup may be part of a causal relationship with cognitive decline. This medicine does what it is what targeted to do- but it turns out amyloid buildup may not play the role we thought (as the medicine doesn’t do anything for the actual symptoms). So it’s cool in that it makes us think about lines of inquiry being off the mark, but I wouldn’t prescribe it to any of my Alzheimer’s pts.-because again it doesn’t actually help

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You’re getting downvoted but this is in-line with what one of the Aduhelm researches told me. Removing amyloid plaques may prove to be important but it’s clearly not the whole picture.

It's not. Biogens Aduhelm out now does the same in being able to remove plaques...but does nothing in patients to stop or reverse cognitive decline. But it does give people brain bleeds at $30k-50k for the treatment. It was the drug that was pushed through the FDA against all recommendations that it shouldn't because it doesn't significantly help patients.

Please fuck all the way off. Like you have any idea how difficult it is to develop a decent drug, especially one targeted towards the brain. How many thousands of researchers are working on Alzheimer’s, how many billions of dollars have been poured into it. How many people work at these companies that are there because they’ve seen their family and friends waste away from it. Shame on you for putting less than two seconds of thought into your judgement.

I’d wager that you’re not a biologist, nor have any experience that would give you the first clue about the science and economics of drug development.

The effect this study found is so small it could very well evaporate in follow-up studies. It's not proof we can modify Alzheimer's at all. At best it's an indication of an avenue for further research. That's my point: We're celebrating before we're certain there's anything to celebrate.

Regarding the difference between dementia research and the novel coronavirus, we need to keep in mind that they are not remotely equivalent situations.

First, they don't have equivalent economic or social impacts. SARS-CoV-2 is killing and disabling far more people and wreaking havoc on global economic systems. Dementia is not.

Second, their research involves different levels of complexity. Identifying and developing treatments for a novel virus is a lot more straightforward (relatively speaking) than unlocking the secrets of the brain. Neuroscience on a whole is a field that is a slow slog.

Third, the research is occurring on different scales. Alzheimer's was first described in 1906, when scientific publishing was still quite young. All of the basic research, case studies, and clinical reports happened when there were very few places to publish, very few researchers, and there wasn't a ton of research specialization.

Covid, on the other hand, came along at what may be the height of academic publishing. There are tons of journals on every conceivable specialty--more than a few of dubious quality--and a "publish or perish" mindset that drives people to put anything out there whether or not it's decent work. Additionally, the medical research and scientific field is huge compared to what it was with specialists for everything you can think of.

And Covid, because of it's unique behavior as a virus that affects pretty much every organ system, touched all of those specialties simultaneously.

Instead of the basic research trickling out in the pages of The Lancet over months or years because that is how science worked in the early 20th century, everyone and his cousin published their observations and experiments at roughly the same time.

As horrifying as Covid was, watching the research explode virtually overnight was incredible. But, yeah, while Alzheimer's research is definitely underfunded, one can't draw any meaningful conclusions from a comparison with Covid research.

Only in Second Life.

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It's not just death or improvement, it is all the middle ground of increased disability and impairment that it can cause (including swelling and bleeding) can likely leave a person much more disabled and impaired, whilst still alive, than Alzheimer's would itself. That the phase 3 study did not reveal any but already two in an open label, extension study is itself highly concerning, and in my opinion shows this drug is clearly not near being ready for market.

Alzheimer's is bad, but showing at best a modest improvement on oddly chosen end points in early disease whilst risking significantly disabling side effects that works directly against what you hope the drug will achieve makes me concerned.

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…this trial is in very early disease. These patients could live for decades.

Isn't it possible that the processes resulting in AD begins many years before symptoms appear, and that deposits of amyloid plaque are an early sign of these processes, i.e., that plaque does not immediately cause cognitive decline and dementia, thus, it can be present in the brains of individuals who do not present any symptoms of AD (but who would eventually do so if they lived long enough)?

My mother died of AD last week. She only began showing symptoms in October of last year.

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