Success against Alzheimers and Dementia in mice

[pokerfan]

Some potential good news on the Alzheimers front...

Scientists from the Technical University of Munich has used a BACE inhibitor drug reduces the amount of amyloid beta in the brains of mice and restores the normal function of nerve cells and significantly improves memory.

<snip>

The scientists’ findings will soon find its way into clinical practice: A large-scale clinical trial is planned with around 1000 participants to test a slightly modified form of the BACE inhibitor. “Needless to say, we very much hope that the promising discoveries in the animal model will translate to humans”, Busche says.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/07/success-against-alzheimers-and-dementia-in-mice.html

[Phoenix61]

1. Fingers crossed

Alzheimer's is a wicked disease.

[FM123]

2. Wow, this really sounds promising!

[defacto7]

3. And if it succeeds in human trials

our next hope is that it won't disapear into the ethers afterward like some other successful drugs and inventions have.

[Igel]

6. Many "successful" drugs and interventions aren't.

Advocacy science truly sucks. The more important a researcher thinks his research is for human welfare, the more corrupted it's likely to be.

Education research and most social science research is abysmal. They all want to be Messiahs or Inquisitors, and the psychological pressure to save the world or show how wrong some group is is truly amazing.

Medical research is often bad, quite bad, as well. They run 500 subjects and throw out 200 that don't respond. Leaving 300 that do. Or they run the trial 5 times, and present findings from trials 2 and 5--you see, they needed two, and when 3 didn't work they ran trial 4, and when that didn't work, trial 5.

It's why the latest thinking is that you public you trial protocols ahead of time, and when you submit the findings you submit *all* the data and are reamed out if you changed the protocols. The experiment design was set for a reason--the biggest reason to change it is because you didn't get the right results.

Computer modelling leads to in vitro trials lead to animal trials leads to human trials. Is the risk of the drug greater than that of the ailment? Then the test is whether the treatment that works works better than placebo. Then after the stuff's approved, they go back and examine the results to see if the trial results were right.

Seldane was pulled off the market after years. It passed all the necessary trials but a review of its efficacy and risks from years of actual use showed it had a nasty tendency on occasion to cause the heart to stop. I'm probably alive because of Seldane. On the other hand, it could have killed me. In balance, better to have it gone--I'd have gotten something else, and the risk to me from a less effective drug would have been more than compensated by reduced risk to others.

Or take a hypertension drug that was approved, oh, in the '90s. It was supposed to do a great job. Five years in, it was found to have almost no effect on the general population but had a low, persistent severe complication rate. It was gone from the market. All downside, no upside. Bye-bye, successful but unsuccessful treatment.

But then the original team asked how the hell they got such great results during the drug trials if it was either useless at best or dangerous at worst? They found that their trial group had more blacks in it than average, and if they just looked at black participants the drug was great--yes, with a low incidence of severe side effects, but it treated hypertension, and many of the cases where other drugs on the market had no effect. It did nothing good for whites but had some possible bad side effects, and in the real world it was whites that made up most of the market. The drug was re-authorized for treatment of hypertension among African-Americans among cries of having a dangerous drug on the market that specifically targeted blacks. "They're trying to kill us" was the paranoid rant.

Finding the mechanism the drug used found a gene that was disproportionately present in black Americans and responsible for their different salt regulation. It also led to a push to have not only more diverse trial participant pools, but when analyzing the data to segregate the data for different groups to see if there are specific positive or negative effects for a given racial group.

Trust the process. Most things that don't work don't make it to market; most things that do, do.

[Duppers]

4. Some great comments at the linked site.

Still reading.

It would be fantastic if a way could be found to reverse all dementia, not just AD.

[Laffy Kat]

5. Reverse doesn't seem likely because when neurons are gone, they are gone.

But arresting the process and prevention sure do seem like a possibility now.