originally i was going to write this entire trial off as a pharma industry snow job with heavily contrived data -- and it still might be -- but i think there's

originally i was going to write this entire trial off as a pharma industry snow job with heavily contrived data -- and it still might be -- but i think there's probably at least something worth talking about here. the drug slows progression, allegedly by clearing amyloid plaques. in one sense, that is not enough. alzheimer's still wins in the long run. in another sense, it's a big improvement in the state of the science and clinical practice. the stuff we were using to try to slow the progression of alzheimer's before was largely ineffective. trials like this shed light on fundamental research questions while hopefully helping patients at the same time. on the other hand, if the progression is slowed at the cost of a large drop in patient quality of life, it may not be worth it clinically in the present state. there's no indication that this is the case, but i wouldn't rule it out until we have more data. there seem to be allergic reactions and potential brain swelling as side effects of the therapy. personally, i would predict that these effects are far more common than is being currently reported. that doesn't mean the therapy is useless, just that it has consequences like any other therapy does. finally, the amyloid hypothesis has come under a lot of scrutiny recently. as the article points out, removing most plaques does not lead to a cured patient, merely an improvement -- but not an improvement which brings the patient back to normal function. if this trial ends up falling through, it might be the end of the amyloid hypothesis in clinical practice and drug development. that would be a step forward towards a greater understanding... but also very discouraging because we'd need to discard a lot of what we were assuming was the canon up to this point.