> Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
> The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months.
1. This is great news… for mice with Alzheimer’s that don’t mind treatments every 6 months.
2. It’s crazy to think about something like this actually curing Alzheimer’s in humans, even if for just 6 months. Even more so if repeated doses have the same effects.
3. As with all of these studies, mice != humans, but it’s nice to have hope.
Side note: the temporary part of #2 makes me think about The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey [1]. It’s hard to fathom having a relative “come back” like that for a short time. Or even permanently.
I usually consider dialysis to be the point where treatments start to become very limiting. Twice a week, most people feel tied to their dialysis clinic and cannot go far from it.
Dialysis specifically requires several hours and a specific location and its debilitating. Going to a random pharmacy to take an injection 2x a week would be much simpler.
Being forced to sit in a chair for several hours every few days isn't what makes dialysis so debilitating. It's the loss of kidney function that dialysis doesn't replace, tied with the cardiovascular stress of emptying all the waste from the body at once.
"The researchers found that engaging in as little as 35 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, compared to zero minutes per week, was associated with a 41% lower risk of developing dementia over an average four-year follow-up period. Even for frail older adults—those at elevated risk of adverse health outcomes—greater activity was associated with lower dementia risks.
The researchers found dementia risk decreased with higher amounts of physical activity. Dementia risks were 60% lower in participants in the 35 to 69.9 minutes of physical activity/week category; 63% lower in the 70 to 139.9 minutes/week category; and 69% lower in the 140 and over minutes/week category."
People keep telling they'd sacrifice everyting for an hypothetical silver bullets while doing nothing in their day to day life to mitigate all these disease. Eat clean, exercise, 8 hours of deep good uninterrupted sleep, &c.
3/4th of people are obese or overweight, the average Joe walks like 4k steps a day, people, at large, don't give a shit about health until they get a terminal diagnosis
Which is not that bad. 10k/steps was a made up marketing goal from a speedometer company. The sweet spot is around 7k/steps day, but 4k/steps day is already seeing benefits.
Close to nothing if you live in a multi generational house where people are close by and can take care of each other, thousands per month if you delegate everything to medical practices. I've witnessed both cases, many times
The fact that no money exchanges hands doesn't mean that it costs nothing. The work is still the same. In multigenerational house younger generations pay with their life opportunities for the care.
#2 isn't necessarily so even. They said the effects lasted at least 6 months, not "only". I haven't read the study, but it sounds to me that it was 6 months of success then publish.
Yes, and consider how an animal that lives only 2 years gets Alzheimer's in the first place. They must be genetically engineered to have super turbo Alzheimer's. Normal Alzheimer's doesn't progress so fast I think.
You’re not seeing all the other candidate treatments that made things worse. If it just gives everyone a heart attack immediately the question would be, why didn’t you try this out on mice first?
My body, my choice. I get the restriction on marketing and selling until some degree of safety and perhaps efficacy is demonstrated. But I should be allowed to choose to take the treatment if offered for free, even without any previous study.
The main reason for all of this, is scams. Nutjobs without any medical background making claims without any scientific evidence.
Or scam artists putting sawdust from a "special tree" into a bottle, and saying it cured his aunt, so it will cure you! If you look at the history of such things, it's just a constant battle against people being fleeced out of money.
Con artists (and some of these wear lab coats and are quite professional in appearance and speak) know that desperation means easy prey. It's disgusting, but there it is.
And it wasn't just a little problem. It was a huge problem. If the legal framework we have in place was torn down, you'd see all that re-emerge in a second.
I agree that there should indeed be a way to balance snail oil salesman techniques, with the choice of someone in a dire circumstance. I did once read that there are FDA approved methods to get in on early stage/pre-clinical trials. These are targeted for people with severe conditions. People aren't being heartless here.
But at the same time, loved ones will litigate to get money back from scam artists. This also includes going after doctors or facilities or anyone willing to enable such actions. And if treatments go sideways, and no one validated that it was anything more than made up gibberish? The lawsuits will fly then, too. The cops may follow.
And it should be this way
Truth is, you are free to imbibe and consume anything you want. No one can really stop you. And whatever method is being used here, I'm sure you could replicate it, buy the hardware, and so on. You are free to do this.
And no, I am not allowed to imbibe and consume anything I want (see war on drugs), nor is someone allowed to make a drug for me, even if they give it to me for free.
I am not free to just make a medication on my own. I tried this. The lab I was going to rent backed out when the FDA threatened shutting them down.
That's fair, I guess, but say there were some way for me to sign a contract saying they could test on me should I become afflicted Alzheimer's? Wouldn't there be some sort of legal protection for them, then?
Because I'd happily do it. I've watched multiple family members suffer from some form of severe mental decline and it is horrifying enough to make me willing to sacrifice myself if there is even a sliver of a chance that my sacrifice will help future generations avoid that pain. And since we're all nerds here, we all know that if we want to know if a thing actually works the way we want it to, we have to test it repeatedly in its working environment.
I'd say that depends on how effective something is. If a treatment makes significant changes to most of the patients, you can have sufficient effectiveness proof before you're halfway done with the phase 1 safety trial.
There is plenty of data that shows that people are bad judges of their future opinions. “If X happened to me, I wouldn’t want to live anymore” often turns out to not be true.
That makes it questionably whether consent years or even months ago implies consent now.
And yes, that is very problematic in cases such as Alzheimer’s where people cannot consent now.
These are untested treatments with unknown impacts. Consider playing Russian roulette with the patient. The risk isn't the same but the outcomes have the same range. From nothing to death.
Human can’t consent in this case but they can feel immense pain and suffering still in ways that failed experimentation could invoke. Which may be worse than further decay and eventual death.
So far all the prior Amyloid clearing drugs did not cause recovery in people despite doing so in mice. Its meant a lot of researchers now aren't convinced that the Beta Amyloid is the problem in Alzheimer's. I hope this one ends up differently, its definitely a lot faster and more effective than the others at clearing.
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h... for an IMO compelling argument that amyloid really is the underlying cause. The theory is that amyloid buildup causes misfolded tau proteins which cause the cognitive damage. So reducing amyloid in people already suffering from Alzheimer's doesn't do much because they already have excessive tau; at best it might slow down the progression.
Well that's depressing. My biggest fear, and this isn't a bad setup for a joke, is early-onset Alzheimers. I don't think I'm especially high-risk for it, but I did have a single great-grandfather who got it so technically it does run in my family. It seems so horrible, having your brain sort of deteriorate and losing all your memories, and being a burden to everyone.
Ideally I never get it, but if I do get I hope it's in like my late 90's, or even better by the time I get it they already have a cure, though the fact this might not work for humans makes me a little sad.
there’s some interesting treatment in china that seems promising. something about unclogging drains in the neck. friend told me it looked ‘possible’.
the whole western field is 15-20 years behind because some researcher lied about plaque data and everyone spent all their time chasing the lead. I think you’ll see useful therapies in 15-20 years from the west, maybe sooner if all the some ai hype pans out.
or the Chinese thing turns out to work! can’t tell myself. there’s probably an American who will try it at some point and publish a case study. Very tough to judge Chinese papers..
There is also this study (https://doi.org/10.1002/trc2.70101), showing some benefit regarding cognition in alzheimers patients. AFAIK it's the first human trial in this context though, so it is still very preliminary.
Here is the big question: How profitable would this be for big pharma if it really worked? If the answer isn't an enormous number, this isn't going anywhere beyond the researchers who published their work.
If the cost to the UK is reported to be 42 billion per year [0] (need to do more verification on this) and I quickly couldn’t see a figure for the US, then I believe there is an argument for a nationalisation policy where the government writes a very large cheque to the company and then makes the treatment free to everyone.
A bit socialisation of health care for some but the benefits to the economy may well be worth the trade alone, never mind the individual benefits
The problem is, you're not just writing a large cheque in return for a working treatment. You're writing a large cheque to roll the dice on some research that might (and probably won't, statistically) result in a working treatment. So you need a very large cheque so that you can fund multiple research projects in the hopes that one of them will give you a treatment. Even then, there's the possibility that none of them will work and you've got nothing to show for any of the money spent.
> Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
> The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months.
1. This is great news… for mice with Alzheimer’s that don’t mind treatments every 6 months.
2. It’s crazy to think about something like this actually curing Alzheimer’s in humans, even if for just 6 months. Even more so if repeated doses have the same effects.
3. As with all of these studies, mice != humans, but it’s nice to have hope.
Side note: the temporary part of #2 makes me think about The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey [1]. It’s hard to fathom having a relative “come back” like that for a short time. Or even permanently.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13820498
If this was effective on humans I think most people would accept having treatments 2x a year
One must live a very privileged life to mind a 2x a year inconvenience in exchange for a working brain.
I wouldn't mind 10x a day injections if it keeps Alzheimer's at bay. Actually, I wouldn't mind a continuous IV drip.
I usually consider dialysis to be the point where treatments start to become very limiting. Twice a week, most people feel tied to their dialysis clinic and cannot go far from it.
Dialysis specifically requires several hours and a specific location and its debilitating. Going to a random pharmacy to take an injection 2x a week would be much simpler.
And plenty of people living with diabetes manage to self-medicate with injections multiple times a day.
Being forced to sit in a chair for several hours every few days isn't what makes dialysis so debilitating. It's the loss of kidney function that dialysis doesn't replace, tied with the cardiovascular stress of emptying all the waste from the body at once.
Did anyone say that?
Why has nobody made a backpack dialysis machine so you can keep going about your day?
A combination of not quite feasible, not quite usable if created, not quite safe.
There are portable ones you can self administer overnight.
> wouldn't mind 10x a day injections if it keeps Alzheimer's at bay. Actually, I wouldn't mind a continuous IV drip.
There seems to be a much better way:
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/small-amounts-of-moderate-...
"The researchers found that engaging in as little as 35 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, compared to zero minutes per week, was associated with a 41% lower risk of developing dementia over an average four-year follow-up period. Even for frail older adults—those at elevated risk of adverse health outcomes—greater activity was associated with lower dementia risks.
The researchers found dementia risk decreased with higher amounts of physical activity. Dementia risks were 60% lower in participants in the 35 to 69.9 minutes of physical activity/week category; 63% lower in the 70 to 139.9 minutes/week category; and 69% lower in the 140 and over minutes/week category."
People keep telling they'd sacrifice everyting for an hypothetical silver bullets while doing nothing in their day to day life to mitigate all these disease. Eat clean, exercise, 8 hours of deep good uninterrupted sleep, &c.
3/4th of people are obese or overweight, the average Joe walks like 4k steps a day, people, at large, don't give a shit about health until they get a terminal diagnosis
>the average Joe walks like 4k steps a day
Which is not that bad. 10k/steps was a made up marketing goal from a speedometer company. The sweet spot is around 7k/steps day, but 4k/steps day is already seeing benefits.
Not everyone can just choose to get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep! I’d love to.
Apples and oranges.
You're talking about prevention, but this is about cure / treatment.
Once you have already have Alzheimer's, exercise isn't going to save you.
>You're talking about prevention, but this is about cure / treatment
Not "apples vs oranges". More like "diabetes vs healthy diet".
Most wouldn't need treatment if they worked at prevention.
Doesn't fully correct for different biaises like healthy user bias so it proves association more than causality.
What am I to infer from this? That people prone to dementia tend to have less energy for voluntary vigorous physical activity?
If not, why not?
>vigorous physical activity
140 minutes/week is really really far from vigorous.
"vigorous" isn't a period of time or an amount of time per week. It describes the level of physical activity, not the amount.
Might be confusing terms here. Vigorous exercise tends to describe high intensity rather than high volume.
Of course, but that’s assuming:
1. There aren’t serious side effects that make it more of a tradeoff
2. The price isn’t on the order of 6-7 figures (or possibly less for some)
As someone close to a severe Alzheimer’s case - I would personally write a check for $100K in a heartbeat for a treatment that worked.
And yes - I mean I would do that every 6 months.
I’m curious: Do you have any idea what care for such situations costs today?
I don’t, no.
But my point isn’t so much about willingness to pay for such a treatment, but ability to pay for such a treatment.
My understanding is that some treatments like this are sometimes not covered by insurance, so only high income individuals are able to afford them.
On the other hand, long-term care often is covered by insurance, and the insurance is more affordable.
Close to nothing if you live in a multi generational house where people are close by and can take care of each other, thousands per month if you delegate everything to medical practices. I've witnessed both cases, many times
The fact that no money exchanges hands doesn't mean that it costs nothing. The work is still the same. In multigenerational house younger generations pay with their life opportunities for the care.
>1. This is great news… for mice with Alzheimer’s that don’t mind treatments every 6 months.
Would you rather test it directly on humans?
Do you think they did it not caring whether it's also eventually applicable to humans all?
Do you think if the treatment reaches humans and is effective, and Alzheimer’s patient would "mind treatments every 6 months"?
#2 isn't necessarily so even. They said the effects lasted at least 6 months, not "only". I haven't read the study, but it sounds to me that it was 6 months of success then publish.
Yes, and consider how an animal that lives only 2 years gets Alzheimer's in the first place. They must be genetically engineered to have super turbo Alzheimer's. Normal Alzheimer's doesn't progress so fast I think.
Also, lab mice only live for ~2 years. A study of mice for significantly longer than that doesn't make sense.
I immediately thought of Awakenings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awakenings_(book) also.
Aren't you a ray of sunshine...
I don’t know why this isn’t a case where human subjects for the tests aren’t allowed.
You’re not seeing all the other candidate treatments that made things worse. If it just gives everyone a heart attack immediately the question would be, why didn’t you try this out on mice first?
My body, my choice. I get the restriction on marketing and selling until some degree of safety and perhaps efficacy is demonstrated. But I should be allowed to choose to take the treatment if offered for free, even without any previous study.
>My body, my choice
This is not available to you yet. Their drug, their choice.
Nobody will offer it to you though. And if they don't even get it to work in an animal model, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't even exist.
The main reason for all of this, is scams. Nutjobs without any medical background making claims without any scientific evidence.
Or scam artists putting sawdust from a "special tree" into a bottle, and saying it cured his aunt, so it will cure you! If you look at the history of such things, it's just a constant battle against people being fleeced out of money.
Con artists (and some of these wear lab coats and are quite professional in appearance and speak) know that desperation means easy prey. It's disgusting, but there it is.
And it wasn't just a little problem. It was a huge problem. If the legal framework we have in place was torn down, you'd see all that re-emerge in a second.
I agree that there should indeed be a way to balance snail oil salesman techniques, with the choice of someone in a dire circumstance. I did once read that there are FDA approved methods to get in on early stage/pre-clinical trials. These are targeted for people with severe conditions. People aren't being heartless here.
But at the same time, loved ones will litigate to get money back from scam artists. This also includes going after doctors or facilities or anyone willing to enable such actions. And if treatments go sideways, and no one validated that it was anything more than made up gibberish? The lawsuits will fly then, too. The cops may follow.
And it should be this way
Truth is, you are free to imbibe and consume anything you want. No one can really stop you. And whatever method is being used here, I'm sure you could replicate it, buy the hardware, and so on. You are free to do this.
It's just that no one wants to help.
So you are free.
That’s why said “if offered for free.”
And no, I am not allowed to imbibe and consume anything I want (see war on drugs), nor is someone allowed to make a drug for me, even if they give it to me for free.
I am not free to just make a medication on my own. I tried this. The lab I was going to rent backed out when the FDA threatened shutting them down.
>nor is someone allowed to make a drug for me, even if they give it to me for free.
Nutjobs and snake-oil are not just for-profit. See cults. See bizarro medical claims from kooks. See flat eathers.
>I am not free to just make a medication on my own. I tried this. The lab I was going to rent backed out when the FDA threatened shutting them down.
If somebody is going to rent a lab to "make a medication of their own", it's best that they're kept out of it.
Your body your choice has no application here. No one is compromising your bodily autonomy.
The regulation is to ensure a working marketplace - which is fundamentally a collection of humans interacting.
The regulation is to prevent predictable abuses of market power.
That's fair, I guess, but say there were some way for me to sign a contract saying they could test on me should I become afflicted Alzheimer's? Wouldn't there be some sort of legal protection for them, then?
Because I'd happily do it. I've watched multiple family members suffer from some form of severe mental decline and it is horrifying enough to make me willing to sacrifice myself if there is even a sliver of a chance that my sacrifice will help future generations avoid that pain. And since we're all nerds here, we all know that if we want to know if a thing actually works the way we want it to, we have to test it repeatedly in its working environment.
Because instead of curing their Alzheimer it might cause them to die faster with big side-effects if it's not tested well first.
Eventually they will be allowed and there will be a human trial. Not when they're still experimenting.
Just because someone has Alzheimer doesn't mean they're automatically a lab test subject.
This test shows effectiveness, they also need to go through trials to test for safety and unintended side effects
That’s actually the reverse order (and this trial didn’t test efficacy in humans).
> That’s actually the reverse order
I'd say that depends on how effective something is. If a treatment makes significant changes to most of the patients, you can have sufficient effectiveness proof before you're halfway done with the phase 1 safety trial.
If the disease is severe enough to justify an untested treatment with unknown toxicity they aren't aware enough to grant consent.
True.
But they could give consent in advance.
If this horrific disease progresses to the point where ... I give my consent for ... Subject to final approval from family member/doctor/whatever.
> But they could give consent in advance.
There is plenty of data that shows that people are bad judges of their future opinions. “If X happened to me, I wouldn’t want to live anymore” often turns out to not be true.
That makes it questionably whether consent years or even months ago implies consent now.
And yes, that is very problematic in cases such as Alzheimer’s where people cannot consent now.
Most dementia patients have good days and bad. If they consent one day, then don’t the next, what do you do?
Isn't that what power of attorney already is?
Power of attorney isn't unlimited
These are untested treatments with unknown impacts. Consider playing Russian roulette with the patient. The risk isn't the same but the outcomes have the same range. From nothing to death.
>they aren't aware enough to grant consent
That's not really an obstacle, people in those situations have family members consent for all sorts of treatment already.
Human can’t consent in this case but they can feel immense pain and suffering still in ways that failed experimentation could invoke. Which may be worse than further decay and eventual death.
Because the Federal Death Administration wouldn’t allow it.
So far all the prior Amyloid clearing drugs did not cause recovery in people despite doing so in mice. Its meant a lot of researchers now aren't convinced that the Beta Amyloid is the problem in Alzheimer's. I hope this one ends up differently, its definitely a lot faster and more effective than the others at clearing.
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h... for an IMO compelling argument that amyloid really is the underlying cause. The theory is that amyloid buildup causes misfolded tau proteins which cause the cognitive damage. So reducing amyloid in people already suffering from Alzheimer's doesn't do much because they already have excessive tau; at best it might slow down the progression.
I've read this article before, and it makes me think OP article, even if working on humans, would still not alleviate Alzheimer.
Well that's depressing. My biggest fear, and this isn't a bad setup for a joke, is early-onset Alzheimers. I don't think I'm especially high-risk for it, but I did have a single great-grandfather who got it so technically it does run in my family. It seems so horrible, having your brain sort of deteriorate and losing all your memories, and being a burden to everyone.
Ideally I never get it, but if I do get I hope it's in like my late 90's, or even better by the time I get it they already have a cure, though the fact this might not work for humans makes me a little sad.
And what?
(Or was that the joke?)
Nope, that wasn't intended to be a joke, I just forgot to finish the sentence. Edited.
there’s some interesting treatment in china that seems promising. something about unclogging drains in the neck. friend told me it looked ‘possible’.
the whole western field is 15-20 years behind because some researcher lied about plaque data and everyone spent all their time chasing the lead. I think you’ll see useful therapies in 15-20 years from the west, maybe sooner if all the some ai hype pans out.
or the Chinese thing turns out to work! can’t tell myself. there’s probably an American who will try it at some point and publish a case study. Very tough to judge Chinese papers..
here’s an overview: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12121576/
I was wondering and found the drug Leqembi, started trials in 2007 and basically didn't finish trials until 2022, approved in 2023.
man that's a lifetime for this drug's trials.
[dead]
Creatine seems to make some marginal difference if taken in sufficient dosages, anecdotally. More research is underway.
There is also this study (https://doi.org/10.1002/trc2.70101), showing some benefit regarding cognition in alzheimers patients. AFAIK it's the first human trial in this context though, so it is still very preliminary.
Can’t wait for how this will take decades just to decide if they’ll try this on humans.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45528308
Here is the big question: How profitable would this be for big pharma if it really worked? If the answer isn't an enormous number, this isn't going anywhere beyond the researchers who published their work.
If the cost to the UK is reported to be 42 billion per year [0] (need to do more verification on this) and I quickly couldn’t see a figure for the US, then I believe there is an argument for a nationalisation policy where the government writes a very large cheque to the company and then makes the treatment free to everyone.
A bit socialisation of health care for some but the benefits to the economy may well be worth the trade alone, never mind the individual benefits
[0] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/blog/how-much-does-dementia-ca...
The problem is, you're not just writing a large cheque in return for a working treatment. You're writing a large cheque to roll the dice on some research that might (and probably won't, statistically) result in a working treatment. So you need a very large cheque so that you can fund multiple research projects in the hopes that one of them will give you a treatment. Even then, there's the possibility that none of them will work and you've got nothing to show for any of the money spent.