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Drug Halts Decline In Alzheimer's Patients
ljw1004 writes "Alzheimer's researchers are divided on whether the disease is caused by 'beta amyloid' (a peptide found in Alzheimer brains) or by 'tau protein' (normally used for cellular scaffolding, but can aggregate out of control and destroy neurons). Today in Chicago a new drug has been announced that stops tau aggregation and appears to have halted Alzheimer's-related decline in 300 clinical trial patients. The drug is known as 'rember.' Do you have friends or family who appear to be on the road to dementia? Here is an online questionnaire, part of one used in the clinical trial to diagnose dementia. (Disclosure: I made the online questionnaire, and my father is one of the scientists behind the drug.)"
Is that a deliberate pun on 'remember'? :?
Odd thing about Gen-xers and the following generations...due to our proliferation in playing video games, there won't be as many of us with Alzheimer's, but EVERY one of us is going to wind up with carpal tunnel.
Thank your dad for his research for all of us - this is one of the worst ways to go.
Let me see: On one hand I have a disease that gives me a rather quick (even though painful) death, and on other I have something that slowly turns me into a vegetable. Tough choice? I think not.
If I was forced to pick one (without a hope for cure once I made my choice) I would pick Ebola any day of the week. Thank you very much.
Locked in syndrome More condition than disease, but this is the worst thing I could imagine anyone ever experiencing.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
So let the complaints on the code begin.
BTW if you want to get into the fun stuff answer question 1 incorrect and question 2 correct and hit submit.
On the sad side if you answer questions 1 and 2 correct and then forget the rest of the questions you don't get hit with having some dementia and just a boring all is probably fine screen.
Personally I'd still rather that, than not recognise my daughter. I'd also rather put my loved ones through a relatively swift and dramatic end to my life, than a very slow, gradual decline, in which I am effectively dead to them (as I don't know who they are) long before I stop breathing or moving around.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Haemorrhagic Fevers are bad, but not as bad as the public seems to paint them. Films such as Outbreak, and books such as Richard Preston's Hot Zone have made it seem like Filoviruses and other haemorrhagic diseases kill you in a matter of hours and cause you to have to be buried in a water-tight plastic bag. This is about as accurate as saying cancer patients are going to mutant into something that looks like a Horta due to out-of-control cellular replication.
For Ebola in particular, there are methods of treatment, including a post-exposure vaccine that has shown to be 99% effective in monkeys. The only downside is that it must be administered very quickly, or there will be too much damage already done to the patient (within 4 days.)
I can thinking of many ways of dying that are far more agonising that Ebola. MS would be one. To be gradually robbed of my motor and mental skills would be a horrible and terrifying experience. As someone who recently lost a family member who suffered from senile dementia (and whose dementia was directly responsible for her death), I can say that it is definitely worse for the sufferer than for the family. As painful as your loved one not knowing who you are is, it is far more painful for them, and to watch them, come back to moments of lucidity, only to have to have where they are and what has happened explained to them yet again.
I think it is a sign of the times that people seem to think that physical agony can even begin to compare to psychological agony.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
(I'm a PhD Neuroscience student) It seems like more and more scientists are moving away from the beta amyloid plaque buildup hypthesis. While it seemed like a great lead, people who die with no symptoms of dementia or Alzheimer's Disease can still have a buildup of beta amyloid plaque as massive as the person who did die of Alzheimer's. It could be that high levels of beta amyloid plaque buildup increases the risk of getting Alzheimer's, though. It's a hard disease to crack, that's for sure. If this new drug really does work, it'll save 5 million lives a year, and that's just in the past few years; as the Baby Boomers all get past 65 we're going to start seeing a massive increase in Alzheimer's Disease.
Although Alzheimer's Disease might seem a very scary disease, the reality is often that the family members suffer most. As a partner of someone with Alzheimer's Disease, I can affirm this. Although my wife is only in the early stages of the disease, the effects are already dramatic. She is no longer my equal and I often feel I have to treat her like a teenager, as she is showing similar kind of behaviour. Our teenager daughter is also suffering from not having a "normal" mom anymore.
Although most people with Alzheimer's Disease go through periodes of depression, they often appear to be rather happy with their condition, because they are no longer aware of what has happened to them. They forget that they forget.
Wikipedia also notes:
Which raises the question, is it patentable? TFA notes that the study was funded by a pharmaceutical company, but I am worried that the funding will end when the company discovers that the drug won't be profitable.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
One of the toughest problems when developing drugs for the brain is crossing the "blood-brain barrier". For instance, neurotransmitters will not cross the barrier, so we can only prescribe drugs that affect them, as opposed to prescribing doses of neurotransmitters themselves.
I am 100% sure this is patentable, it is not as if nobody knows about methylene blue; and possibly they have patented a way of getting the drug directly into the brain.
But yes, unpatentable drugs are a real big problem. One of the drugs used to effective treat depression, a Reverse Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitor called Manerix is not available for sale in the U.S. because the company that bought the U.S. rights tried to use it to treat dementia, for which it does not work. By the time the trials failed, the patent was too close to running out to run the paperwork for using it to treat depression, for which it does work. Consequently, it is a safe, effective, drug, with nobody in the U.S. to sponsor it to get through the approval process.
SirWired
I used to think that aging was a very complex set of events. Most of the people here do as well, as you can see by reading other peoples comments. I actually still do. but the graph at the end of the explanation page has me at least curious:
http://www.tau-rx.com/quiz/tangles.html
Squarely 100% of the people are at stage 1 by 85. 50% are at stage 3 or higher.
Keeping in mind that: "correlation is not causation", and all appropriate memes for the case:
Do you feel that this could be a fundamental path (albeit not the only necessary one) to tackle aging or its just one in a miriad of problems?
BindO
There are two schools of thought in drug research. One is to throw lots of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, and the other is "intelligent design," using extensive modelling and simulation to build molecules on spec. So far, the former school is ahead about ten thousand to one.
If you had syphilis in the early 1900s, would you balk at taking Salvarsan just because it contained arsenic, and because the guy who came up with it was on his 606th try? Well, we're in exactly the same boat now with respect to Alzheimer's.
4) "... the trial was funded by a pharmaceutical company..." according to the BBC article.
And they're getting results. What do you value more, your money or your sanity? If you get this particular disease, you (and your family) are going to be damned glad somebody came along and offered you the choice.
If you have a better process in mind, we're all ears. So far, the more-socialized European approach has given us, well, LSD.
You said, "I should say that Claude Wischik thinks he *does* know what causes Alzheimer's disease. He's sure that tau tangles cause it."
...".
But what causes tau tangles?
Fraud? In my opinion, at the very least the BBC story is very badly written. In my opinion, there are elements of fraud. If I were the manager of "Emma Wilkinson, Health reporter, BBC News" I would review her work to try to discover if she has been taking money to advertise drugs. I would consider firing her, or at least re-assigning her to less demanding writing projects.
Quote from the BBC article: "Rember, or methylthioninium chloride, is the first treatment specifically designed to target the Tau tangles." There was no "design". The effect was discovered entirely because of a laboratory accident with a common laboratory chemical. Quote from the BBC article: "Methylthioninium chloride is more commonly used as a blue dye in laboratory experiments. Professor Wischik discovered it by accident 20 years ago, when a drop in a test tube led to the disappearance of the Tau protein he had been working on."
It seems a bit odd that, if Professor Wischik discovered the effect 20 years ago, there is an investigation of the effect only now. Why the delay? What happened?
Cancer? The BBC article should have mentioned that the laboratory chemical they are now calling "Rember" is an aniline dye, that aniline dyes cause cancer, and that has been known for a long time. Quote from that web page: "A group of chemicals called arylamines are known to cause bladder cancer. These chemicals have been banned in the UK for about 20 years. But it can take up to 25 years for a bladder cancer to develop. You may have been exposed to them a long time ago if you work in industries such as rubber or plastics manufacture. Arylamines that increase risk of bladder cancer include * Aniline dyes
What that quote doesn't say is that direct chemical exposure can cause cancer immediately. How is it possible that "chemicals have been banned in the UK for about 20 years" can be given to people in the U.K. as a drug?
The title of the BBC article is NOT "Alzheimer's drug halts decline". It is "Alzheimer's drug 'halts' decline", but people with no professional writing experience will almost certainly miss the significance of the single quotes, which mean that a claim is merely being made, and the claim is not a verified fact.
The BBC article contains 539 words total. Of those, 243 words, more than half, are quotes. It seems that much of the article may have been taken from a PR release, with little or no critical thinking.
Calling the dye "Rember" encourages those with no scientific training in the field to believe that it will help them "Remember".
There are other odd aspects of the BBC article. The article says, "Trials of the drug, known as Rember, in 321 patients showed an 81% difference in rate of mental decline compared with those not taking the treatment." Does that mean there continues to be mental decline, but the decline is slower?
Later the article says, "Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease were given either 30, 60 or 100mg of the drug or a placebo. The 60mg dose produced the most pronounced effect - over 50 weeks there was a seven-point difference on a scale used to measure severity of dementia." How many points total are on the scale? Isn't that odd, that the 60 milligram dose worked better than a 100 milligram dose? How much better? Doesn't that say that there were really 3 trials, and one of the dosage levels was by chance statistically better than the others, so it was chosen to report the results?
The BBC article says, "At 19 months there was no significant decline in mental function in patients taking the drug, the researchers said."
What gets me is that 3 years ago, people found a direct link between HHV1 (Herpes Simplex 1 - the kind you get coldsores from), and Alzheimers; literally, the plaques are riddled with the virus.
Add into the mix the fact that new hi-res MRI devices show microbleeds all over the brain of most people, and that these break the blood/brain barrier in those areas, and it gives a very simple mechanism for the virus to get into the brain (even if it doesn't just travel up the neurons themselves).
Why are people focusing on the plaques and the tangles? We have a virus here that lives inside of neurons, which has been found and strongly correlated with the disease.
There are other classes of herpes virus which have similarly been implicated in brain cancer. This should be a big fat red X marks the spot. But most researchers are too specialized.
Coming soon - pyrogyra