Curing Alzheimer’s

Innovation requires novel thinking, not incremental actions. We can cure age-related diseases – such as Alzheimer’s – not with funding, intelligence, or effort alone, but only if we reassess our assumptions. Until we look carefully at our conceptual foundations, we cannot expect to build a therapeutic structure. Ironically, the key problem lies in our looking […]

Often, when problems seem intractable, we’re asking the wrong questions. We want to get to the moon: how can we jump higher? We want to get to the stars: how can we make bigger rockets? As Henry Ford once suggested, people wanted a better way to travel, so they wanted to know how to breed […]

Everyone favors innovation and diversity, as long as you’re not innovative or diverse. This remark, snarky as it is, is also (heartbreakingly) accurate. We argue that we support innovation, but we fight to prevent innovative concepts or industries. The more innovative an idea, the more we actively resist, regulate, and revolt against that idea. Diversity […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last weekend, a global entrepreneur asked me about the difference between much of the current research and what we’re doing. He cited the example of a particular compound (NAD+), but any number of other compounds could be given as examples. My answer was that most researchers are focused on their one particular tree and can’t […]

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 […]