Alzheimer’s

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 […]

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 […]

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Variously Attributed [This blog was written and published on Monday July 20th, two days prior to the announcement of the results of Eli Lilly’s clinical trials of solanezumab for Alzheimer’s.] Until now, there have been only two globally-approved drugs for […]

Alzheimer’s disease steals our souls. We lose our humanity when it destroys the neurons that make up a critical part of our brains, but why those neurons die has always remained a mystery since “senility” was first noted, thousands of years ago. Even in the past century, since it was first described clinically by Dr. […]

Things are slowly beginning to move ahead on our project to cure Alzheimer’s disease. It’s clear that not only is the role of microglia slowly becoming accepted, but there are more and more investors who see an opportunity to help move biotech and medicine from the old paradigm (BAPP and Tau cause disease) to the […]

An odd thing is happening in the world of biotechnology: an avalanche is starting. The context is also interesting, for over the past twenty five years, a profound revolution has occurred in our understanding of aging. Where once we took aging for granted, we now reexamine the process, looking for a way to reverse it. […]

Every several weeks, I notice publication of yet another article trumpeting another aspect of Alzheimer’s. Where once it was APOE-4, AB42, or SS31 (an antioxidant peptide), more recent work emphasizes arginine metabolism in the microglia. The good news is that research community has — ponderously and hesitantly — finally begun to shift the clinical focus […]

At the moment, there are four companies planning human trials to reset telomeres using telomerase genes. In every case, the intent is to put the telomerase genes (hTERT and hTERC) into human patients in an effort to cure age-related diseases. Let’s look at the diseases and then the companies involved. Essentially, all age-related diseases occur […]

As I write this in March of 2015, there are 1,315 registered clinical studies of potential interventions for Alzheimer’s disease (see ClinicalTrials.gov). While it is hard to define clearly, many of these studies deal with nursing issues, rather than medical interventions aimed at preventing or curing the pathology itself. Of those that are testing potential […]

As of 2013, we can neither cure nor prevent a single age-related disease. Even at our absolute best – and then only questionably and in one or two cases – can we even slow the unrelenting progress of any of our myriad age-related diseases. Trying for an optimistic view of current medical interventions, and even […]