Alzheimer’s disease

Hardly a day goes by, and never an entire week, without my seeing yet another article, often a cover article, that suggests we will soon cure Alzheimer’s disease. If articles were anything to go by, then the increasing tempo of those articles, to say nothing of the increases in both research and funding, would suggest […]

We waste stunning amounts of money and effort on comprehensively ineffective trials. As a recent article points out, in the past 15 years, there have been 123 Alzheimer drug failures and, while four medicines have been approved, none of them affect the progress of the disease. Symptomatic therapy at best, we have no medications – […]

Perspective often shrinks personal problems. Late Sunday night, I received a cry for help from a woman whose mother has Alzheimer’s disease: she asked me to meet her family and offer professional advice. Their concern was not only her medications, but the ability of her physician, the stress on the family, and the patient’s own […]

Early last Saturday, I received a short, sad email from an old friend. Many of you may know Leonard Hayflick, who first pointed out that cells age, more than fifty years ago. He stood up for himself and for the truth of his data, in the face of strong opposition and irrationality, and finally proved […]

The problem with prediction is that everyone disagrees about the future (and don’t look ahead anyway). Most of us look backward and assume that the view will be just the same (but more so?) if we turned around and looked ahead. The wonderful thing about hindsight is that not only is it easy, but everyone […]

The problem with curing Alzheimer’s is, as with so much of our understanding of aging and age-related diseases, that we make unexamined assumptions. Let me admit that many of our unexamined assumptions are either useful or reasonable. I assume that the sun will come up again tomorrow morning and that’s a useful and reasonable assumption. […]

History provides perspective, probably because we keep repeating it. Several hundred years ago, smallpox was the scourge of Europe. Treatment, such as it was, consisted of compassion, fluids, and a gamut of various herbs, bark, roots, and fungal preparations, none of which changed the mortality. The diligent healer of the late middle ages tried hard […]

An odd thing came across my desk yesterday: a reminder that some people, without meaning to, encourage not only a sense of futility and gloom, but in their dark view of the world, they end up encouraging disease, including Alzheimer’s. In the middle ages, it was common to attribute disease and suffering to god’s will […]

The rate-limiting-step to innovation is assumption. Often, we have the infrastructure, the knowledge, and even the intelligence we need to move ahead, but stumble and fall over our own assumptions. Why didn’t Europe use immunizations hundreds of years earlier than it did? Why didn’t we discover – and make use of – the steam engine […]

We’re going to take an odd detour into both chaos theory and traffic flow in order to understand Alzheimer’s disease, so fasten your seatbelt. The key cascade of pathology that we’re going to look at (and explain) is the presence of beta amyloid plaques in patients with Alzheimer’s, but the principle applies equally to tau […]

Our new biotechnology company, Telocyte, is moving along, as can be seen in our website. Our mission is simple: we intend to cure Alzheimer’s disease. We have no intention of “ameliorating”, “slowing”, or “improving the care for” Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, our goal is to prevent and cure it entirely. No one should ever have to […]

Most of us are more concerned with whether we can cure Alzheimer’s at all, than we are with the cost of curing it. You can imagine someone saying that dementia is so horrible that “it doesn’t matter what it costs” to treat or cure it. Except that it really does matter. Whether it were a […]

Most of us have wondered about what causes Alzheimer’s. As commonly happens, we stumble badly when we make assumptions, even in asking questions, let alone in trying to answer those questions. The question “what causes Alzheimer’s?” presupposes that there is a single such disease (Alzheimer’s) and that we can define it well enough to ask […]

We are too often satisfied with failure. Not believing we can succeed, we eschew further thinking, and we call it quits. In the case of Alzheimer’s therapy, we define statistical flukes as “hope”, declare victory, and retire into platitudes and misconception. Rather than cure disease or improve human lives, we content ourselves with pessimistic delusions […]

No. Then why do I even bring this up? Yesterday, a patient asked me if Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented (or made less likely) if you ate the “right” diet. It’s a question that strikes not to the core of the pathology, but to the depth of our fears. Historical precedents offer useful parallels and […]