New Alzheimer's Treatment Clears Plaques From Brains of Mice Within Hours
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A new Alzheimer's treatment showed promising results in clearing amyloid-beta plaques from mice brains within hours, but commenters expressed skepticism about its potential effectiveness in humans and the challenges of translating mouse studies to human trials.
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> 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
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 then have a relative into their late 60's that was very laxed about diabetics within recent years.This has lead to kidney issues. They are refusing dialysis because of I guess the stigma attached to it. Now they are experiencing a cognitive decline due to poorly functioning kidneys.
I guess when you want to live you would do whatever it takes.
Oh, also, if you do peritoneal dialysis, it’s daily, whereas hemo dialysis is generally two or three times a week.
For someone with meticulousness, educability on maintaining the pieces that go into PD, and a good living situation, it's far better than hemodialysis. But people like that are rarely the ones whose kidneys fail.
The machine's portability wasn't the only factor. Needed a clean space to set up. There was a second machine hooked up to the house water lines. It would be used to create dialysate which was pumped into the dialysis machine. You could travel without the water pump, but to replace it, you needed these massive disposable bags of dialysate. Each bag was heavier than the machine itself and they were essential.
I guess with car trips, you could take the pump too to generate dialysate on site but it wasn't designed for portability as much as the main dialysis machine was. Was heavier. We kept it on rollers.
There were other supplies needed too. Saline bags. The dialysis machine had one-time use cartridges that were quite convenient but took up a fair bit of space. All added up to considerable bulk.
We only used the machine at distant locations when we knew we were going to be there for a week or more. One factor that made things a little easier was the the dialysis company was willing to deliver supplies to wherever we were, as long as it was within the US. We didn't have to take weeks worth of supplies. But we did have to take enough supplies to get through the first few days before delivery.
Vacations were rare but doable if we were going by car or if there was a dialysis center at the location. I guess we could have flown with the machine but we didn't trust airline baggage handlers enough to risk it.
I guess though a backpack version probably could be more like an always attached glucose device with just a tiny line.
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."
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.
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.
Not "apples vs oranges". More like "diabetes vs healthy diet".
Most wouldn't need treatment if they worked at prevention.
If not, why not?
140 minutes/week is really really far from vigorous.
So while there are lots of excellent reasons to stay active into old age, it's not a replacement for treatment.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not really an obstacle, people in those situations have family members consent for all sorts of treatment already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really, no. A company that unleashed unproven drugs in a vulnerable human population would be sued into oblivion. They would lose in court over and over as judges and juries decided that no, you cannot in fact sign away your right to not be subjected to criminal negligence. They would very likely be subjected to criminal prosecution as well.
This (the lawsuits) happens all the time. People sign waivers, get hurt, and the courts decide that the level of negligence involved overrides the waiver. Happened a while back at a Jiu Jitsu gym. Someone signed all the waivers and got paralyzed and successfully sued for $46 million. The jury decided that the instructor was criminally negligent.
You can have a reasonably informed consent if you have some safety data. You can’t really have someone give informed consent about a totally untested drug.
Something is wrong with your definition of consent if it totally dismisses the patient’s autonomy and right to action.
There’s also a FDA provision for treatment of last resort. If you’ve got a terminal condition with no approved treatment and there’s a possible treatment of unknown safety and effectiveness you can apply and get that treatment.
If you or a loved one has Alzheimer’s I highly encourage you to request this treatment. You’ll be risking unknown side effects and or death, but it will generate data for those who come after and could advance the treatment of this terrible disease by a decade.
This is not available to you yet. Their drug, their choice.
Let me tell you a story about a biotech startup that I worked at many moons ago.
- We were trying to develop new antibiotics to treat certain bacterial infections.
- We had created a new antibiotic that was chemically similar to an existing, commercially successful antibiotic.
- But our drug was ~2-4× more potent at killing certain pathogenic bacteria than the existing med.
- Sounds good for us, right?
- Well, the commercially successful antibiotic was also toxic to humans if administered for "long" periods (it causes severe anemia if administered for 20+ days [I may not remember the precise details here]).
- Therefore, we were concerned that if our drug was 2-4× more potent at killing the microbes, it might also be 2-4× more toxic to people.
- To obtain approval for human tests, we had to run toxicity tests of our drug using several non-human species. Those results were mixed (toxic in some species, non-toxic in others), but we did eventually get approval.
- Unfortunately, the original concerns were correct: our drug caused severe anemia within ~3 days (again, specifics may be wrong), which means that particular candidate died in Phase 1 (initial human trial assessing drug safety).
Thankfully, the severe anemia was reversible in our test subjects (stop taking the drug, and the anemia went away)
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.
As always, there's no guarantee that it will work IRL on Homo sapiens.
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"?
Mice and humans are quite different, and whilst it looks like this treatment actually reverses the effects of dementia in mice, it’s far from clear that it would have the same impact on humans. By the time people start exhibiting Alzheimer’s symptoms, the brain will already have sustained quite a lot of damage - by which I mean death of neurons - so it’s hard to see how this would actually reverse the disease, as opposed to simply slowing or halting its progression, without these neurons being replaced.
This resonates with me particularly strongly, as one of the many failures of my body is that I live with NPH (normal pressure hydrocephalus).
Almost a week ago, I had a spinal tap as a diagnostic test to see if I truly had NPH or if there was a different reason for the bubble of fluid in my brain. An hour after the tap, I felt my arms and legs moving more freely than they had in years, and I was able to move significantly faster than before. And now, a week later, I can feel the stiffness setting in again. I'm sliding my feet more, and I can't move as quickly.
I don't know how to characterize the sense of loss I feel. As my body returns to the pre-spinal tap "normal." I'm left with the fading sensation of a freer movement and a clearer mind, with the hope that one of the treatments for NPH will restore that better self.
I can only imagine, with a bit of horror, the sense someone would have coming out of the fog of Alzheimer's, feeling normal for months. Then the anxiety one might feel, as the Alzheimer's fog returns, and be scared that it might not go away again with the next dose—a real "Flowers for Algernon" moment.
I still need to talk to my neurologist to find out if I qualify for the CFS shunt/drain operation. It would be nice to have a clearer mind and freer body, even if I do become part Borg.
https://raio.org/FlowersForAlgernon.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon
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.
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/
China has an actual medical establishment. The fact that the treat this as homeopathy should give one pause.
As a practicing clinician, I must express significant reservations regarding therapeutic agents emerging from China, particularly those rooted in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). In the absence of rigorous, peer-reviewed validation through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted under Western regulatory standards, such interventions are frequently met with skepticism within the medical community. The prevailing perception among Western practitioners is that TCM-based therapies often lack robust empirical evidence, bearing a conceptual resemblance to homeopathic modalities, which are similarly contentious due to limited mechanistic clarity and inconsistent clinical outcomes. When considering novel pharmacotherapies developed in China, especially those in early-phase clinical trials or lacking approval from regulatory bodies such as the FDA or EMA, the Western medical establishment tends to approach them with caution. For instance, a colleague proposing a TCM-derived treatment would likely feel compelled to provide substantial reassurances to counter the inherent skepticism surrounding its efficacy and safety profile. This is not to dismiss the potential of such innovations outright, but rather to underscore the critical need for transparent, reproducible data to substantiate claims of therapeutic breakthroughs, particularly when these agents remain confined to regional use without broader dissemination in Western markets.
I used to wonder why drs never comment on this site and I'm starting to understand why
(Or was that the joke?)
man that's a lifetime for this drug's trials.
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...
"If "x" % of the population has their life is extended an average of "y" years, how much more does that cost in pension payouts over the life of the individual vs the medical savings from curing Alzheimers?"
I'm with you though. I know I'd want it more than the Alzheimer's.
But you can allow a proxy to make the decision for you via a lasting power of attorney.
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