12 ms·

Small Trial Reverses a Year of Alzheimer's Cognitive Decline in Just Two Months

254 points by lelf 7y ago

benogorek 7y ago
Apparently this works on healthy people as well (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592297/). "it was proposed that use of emerging brain stimulation techniques might also enhance physical and mental performance in sports." Anybody...want to try it?
- kingkawn 7y ago
  I believe this already has some limited use in the military. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00114/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.0011...
- ItsMattyG 7y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if, like TES, this causes neurological tradeoffs. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/10/4482.abstract https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/10/4482.abstract
  - benogorek 7y ago
    "Stimulation to the the posterior parietal cortex facilitated numerical learning, whereas automaticity for the learned material was impaired." Fascinating.
ptah 7y ago
i wonder what the actual treatment feels like and what else the tech can be applied to.
ilamont 7y ago
Unfortunately, many promising studies and early trials don't pan out once large-scale trials get underway.
solveit 7y ago
Tested on 8 people. Sounds wonderful but get back to us when it replicates.
longtom 7y ago
Does anyone have a statistics how often awesome inventions and advances in medicine etc. in the media actually turn out true, also how long it takes on average for them to hit the market, if legit. My hunch is that it's like 2% and 10 years, respectively.
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  I don't think there's any way it's as high as 2%. Would be good to know though.
- _Microft 7y ago
  From what I read the really sad thing is how many of these failures are even not failure of the method or the underlying idea being wrong but pretty mundane things like failing to get funding for follow-up research, workgroups disbanding, PhD students finally throwing in the towel, researchers getting out of research for other reasons (family, ...).
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    Really? I doubt it. Sure, changing teams and funding may have a short term effect, but given how world-changing all the "miracle cures" that are announced would be, and that they so rarely pan out, makes me believe nearly all of these exciting breakthroughs have something fundamentally wrong.
  - danieltillett 7y ago
    My undergrad students did a research paper on this about 10 years ago (when I was a professor). It turns out that most promising results don’t get followed through for non-scientific reasons, mostly a lack of money. We never published the work (I left academia shortly afterwards), but it certainly was depressing. I do realise the irony of not publishing this work.
    - gus_massa 7y ago
      I was going to ask for a link to the paper ... In particular "mostly lack of money" may mean "the results are not convincing enough to get more funds". In this case they already tried something similar in mice, and they made a small business around the hat, and this is a preliminary safety trial, so I expect that they have a follow up. For me, the results are not very convincing: * They don't have a control group (because it is a safety trial) * They have some improvements in difficult to compare test like the amount of words that the person can remember (it's standardized, but I guess you improve automatically the second time you try it, it's difficult to be sure without a control group) * The blood sample test have a few changes marked as "significant" but they are using a very loose criteria to classify it as significant. The error bars overlap too much with the baseline. So I don't expect that they get good results in a big double blind trial, but negative results are difficult to publish in journals and they almost never get press coverage. Also (in other branches of science) it's standard to have a pipeline of papers. While one paper is published, other is been written and other is in the research part, and there are some brainstorming about what to do next. Once a group has a vein of subjects to publish about, it's much easier to continue with something similar.
cbeach 7y ago
Was it a double blind study?
- yxhuvud 7y ago
  It was an initial pre-study where the purpose is to determine if it would even be interesting to do a proper study. They didn't even have a nonblind control group. It is still exciting, because most studies of Alzheimers doesn't even pass this initial step from curing mice.
bencollier49 7y ago
There doesn't appear to have been a control group? Perhaps wearing funny hats is good for cognition.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Either way, that's cool. More research needed. Funny hats is less invasive too.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  It looks like they considered the "control" to be each patient's baseline measurements before beginning treatment.[1] I would imagine it's also difficult to recruit a healthy control group for these sorts of tests where someone with Alzheimers is probably more willing to accept the risk. [1] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02958930 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02958930
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    A proper control group would be people with Alzheimers who get the 'procedure' without actually turning the machine on, but everything else the same.
    - mrgreenfur 7y ago
      Is it needed and / or ethical in this case? Alzheimers patients don't spontaneously recover, seems immoral to deny them treatment via a placebo when there is no possibility of improvement from their current state. I'm not a scientist or anything, just curious what normal procedure is here
      - jrochkind1 7y ago
        Obviously you can't give all Alzheimer's patients your experimental drug/treatment that isn't even shown to work yet. That would not make any sense, and would not in fact be ethical. So, yeah, that is how controls work, generally. If there is some other standardly accepted treatment for Alzheimer's already, it might be unethical to _refrain_ from giving that, perhaps the control would be given that too. But it's not unethical not to give someone the treatment that you don't even know if it works yet. Usually. As a general principle. These are certainly interesting things to talk about in the field of medical ethics, and you can find lots of discussion of them in article and such, it's not always totally straightforward or universally agreed upon and of course medical researchers do unethical things all the time. But simply having a control group that does not get the treatment you are researching is not by itself considered unethical. Which seems to be what you are suggesting. Remember that you don't know if the experimental treatment works at all, that's why it's being studied -- it may even make the condition _worse_, or have negative side effects. And yes, having a control group is normal procedure. And that's what a control group is, starting off in the same place as the experimental group, but not receiving the experimental treatment, with other conditions being normalized the same. If the control group is 'double blinded', then neither the subjects nor the research staff know if a given subject is receiving the experimental treatment or control.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
> The MemorEM device is being developed by NeuroEM Therapeutics, and we should point out that two of the authors behind the new study founded the company – so there is some vested commercial interest here. Nevertheless, the results seem promising in spite of the ridiculously small number of participants, and if other researchers are able to replicate them - that is, if the original study has enough details to build a device with identical EM function - and confirm the results, especially the lack of side-effects claimed by the team, this could be great news to all of us.
andy_ppp 7y ago
So I'm pretty skeptical, they are presumably targeting amyloid plaques in the brain with electro-magnetic stimulation. I just think how? Is it a microwave tuned to destroy the proteins or some other means? The mechanism of action seems very very sketchy to me and I just don't believe you can target proteins without hurting other parts of the brain. Anyone with more information on the mechanism of action I'd love to hear it. Until then I'll assume it's just made up.
- Cederfjard 7y ago
  Here's the research article: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190367 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...
- wereHamster 7y ago
  FTA, though I don't have any more detailed information about the process: > Based on the evidence so far, TEMT looks like it can break up the toxic amyloid-beta and tau proteins that have been extensively linked with Alzheimer's – the waves are apparently able to destabilise the weak hydrogen bonds that hold them together.
  - hoseja 7y ago
    That sounds like something entirely too unspecific. Amyloid plaques aren't the only thing relying on hydrogen bonds...
    - Ensorceled 7y ago
      Many treatments for many diseases do a lot of harm to stuff that we don't want harmed ... chemotherapy, radiotherapy, most of the thousands of drugs have side effects.
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      Molecular hydrogen bonding appears to have a medically-interesting effect on cell permeability in the brain, and I'm sure other things. But most hydrogen bond effects are pretty short-lived, while amyloid plaques build up over a long time as the brain fails to remove them as waste. This is obviously hugely preliminary, but it sounds possible that whatever disruption is being caused is at least shorter-term or less destructive than the benefits of counteracting a slow-moving process like Alzheimer's.
nootropicat 7y ago
>at a frequency of 918 MHz If this works, it lends credence to people that think cell and wifi frequencies are not neutral. The fundamental assumption behind neutrality is that the only effect on the human body is thermal.
- donquichotte 7y ago
  This is different though. It looks like they are using transcranial stimulation, i.e. putting electrodes on both sides of your head and running a current through it, resulting in what I assume to be a quite homogeneous current distribution throughout brain tissue. RF waves' tissue penetration is stronger at the surface of a conductor, see Skin Effect. EDIT: substituting the frequency in [1], we arrive at ~9mm skin depth for 918MHz. [1] http://www.sgoc.de/Download/skin_effect.pdf http://www.sgoc.de/Download/skin_effect.pdf
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    They seem to have also been right up against the FCC limit for radio energy exposure at 1.6 W/kg.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
Beltiras 7y ago
Repeat with larger n and a control group. Till then there's no data to validate the effect.
aazaa 7y ago
Worth reading the "Limitations" section of the original paper: > The main limitation of the present study, as with most open-label studies, is that all subjects received treatment (single-arm) without inclusion of an untreated/placebo group. However, the improvements in multiple cognitive measures observed with TEMT would have been highly unlikely to occur spontaneously in AD subjects, even with repeated testing (as discussed above). Moreover, it is difficult to explain away the CSF/plasma changes and DTI/FA localized enhancements, which are consistent with TEMT’s primary mechanisms of action to disaggregate toxic brain oligomers and enhance mitochondrial function. https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190367 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-... Clearly very preliminary but intriguing work.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > Eight mild/moderate AD patients were treated with TEMT in-home by their caregivers for 2 months utilizing a unique head device. Call me skeptical. Mild/moderate AD patients are basically still functional human beings (and pretty hard to diagnose with good accuracy unless you go for expensive brain imaging) that is nothing like "severe" AZ patients. The fact that they knew they were treated by such an invasive device surely has an impact on how they "felt". Of course, they did not use brain imaging (with tau PET tracers) to diagnose such patients: > Subjects had to be diagnosed with mild or moderate AD, according to the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke-Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria. This is the current state of imaging with tau PET tracers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096533/ > Tau PET tracers have enabled in vivo quantification of PHF-tau burden in human brains. Tau PET can help in understanding the underlying cause of dementia symptoms, and in patient selection for clinical trials of anti-dementia therapies. Add to the potential for unreliable patient selection the very limited sample size, and you could end up with results that look much better than they actually are.
  - 14 7y ago
    I worked in dementia care for a number of years. When we would get a new admission we would do mini mental state exams to determine a sort of baseline as to where they were mentally such as seen here : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/GetPdf.cgi?id=phd001525.1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/GetPdf.cgi... You would ask things like can you tell me today's date. Do you know what season July is in? I will name 3 items have them repeat them and tell them they need to remember them in a little bit. Then you ask again about those objects and see if they can recall. The test goes on and has a bunch of questions which at the end you score. So I could see them doing something similar in this situation where they test cognitive ability and then retest it a month later. These exams I think would be a pretty good baseline to mark improvement.
rpmisms 7y ago
It seems like anti-aging science is making leaps and bounds lately. First the reversed biological clock study, and now this.
tim333 7y ago
>TEMT looks like it can break up the toxic amyloid-beta and tau proteins that have been extensively linked with Alzheimer's – the waves are apparently able to destabilise the weak hydrogen bonds that hold them together. Is that actually a thing - that you can break up proteins by putting a fairly weak electromagnetic field on them? It sounds like the sort of thing you could test in the kitchen with a coil, oscillator and some half cooked eggs.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  I would certainly watch that Youtube video
- josephdviviano 7y ago
  No, it works because it (very likely) stimulates a very specific kind of brain activity that leads the body to break up the proteins. The article's explanation is incorrect. The experiment itself didn't verify what I just said because it is an invivo clinical study, but if you dig around you can find support for my claim.
  - xwolfi 7y ago
    I searched and found a lot of counter arguments to your claim. It seems you're proponent of esoterism and magic thinking, spreading lies against rational double blind large trials. Of course you could make the effort to quote something to back your random nonsense :)
    - 0_gravitas 7y ago
      you could help by quoting the "lot of counter arguments" that you found
    - dang 7y ago
      Personal attacks and flamewar will get you banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart when posting here? We'd be grateful.
throwaway66920 7y ago
Is it suggesting that the current itself breaks down the amyloid plaque? Does this destroy prions?
codesushi42 7y ago
Can this enhance memory for the unimpaired?
randcraw 7y ago
I scanned the article. The authors make no claim that they reversed a year of cognitive decline. Nor did they assess the health of the subjects at any earlier date in order to compare post-treatment performance to that pre-treatment performance to quantify the treatment effect. At most, they idly speculate that on one metric, ONLY THE RESPONDING AD PATIENTS saw as much as 15 months of disease regression (ADAS-cog): "Since a typical decline in ADAS-cog expected for AD subjects is around 4 points over a 12- to 15-month period [48], 2 months of TEMT appears to have reversed cognitive decline (as measured by the ADAS-cog) of responding AD subjects as a group, perhaps back to the cognitive level subjects had 12 to 15 months earlier." Science Alert clearly hyped the story's lead.
graham1776 7y ago
All: Family member recently diagnosed with Early Onset Alz Disease. Articles like this excite us and we desparately want treatments to work (including the hyperbaric chamber, stem cells, dietary changes, the works, etc), but can't help but think following these rabbit trails is only confirmation bias. Does anyone here know of any treatments that actually are worth exploring (ie have actually been studied, but not gained wide-spread adoption). I know this is a shot in the dark but appreciate any new research you could point me to.

254 points by lelf 7y ago

Apparently this works on healthy people as well (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592297/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5592297/). "it was proposed that use of emerging brain stimulation techniques might also enhance physical and mental performance in sports." Anybody...want to try it?

kingkawn 7y ago
I believe this already has some limited use in the military. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00114/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.0011...
ItsMattyG 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if, like TES, this causes neurological tradeoffs. https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/10/4482.abstract https://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/10/4482.abstract
- benogorek 7y ago
  "Stimulation to the the posterior parietal cortex facilitated numerical learning, whereas automaticity for the learned material was impaired." Fascinating.

ptah 7y ago

i wonder what the actual treatment feels like and what else the tech can be applied to.

ilamont 7y ago

Unfortunately, many promising studies and early trials don't pan out once large-scale trials get underway.

solveit 7y ago

Tested on 8 people. Sounds wonderful but get back to us when it replicates.

longtom 7y ago

Does anyone have a statistics how often awesome inventions and advances in medicine etc. in the media actually turn out true, also how long it takes on average for them to hit the market, if legit. My hunch is that it's like 2% and 10 years, respectively.

cs02rm0 7y ago
I don't think there's any way it's as high as 2%. Would be good to know though.
_Microft 7y ago
From what I read the really sad thing is how many of these failures are even not failure of the method or the underlying idea being wrong but pretty mundane things like failing to get funding for follow-up research, workgroups disbanding, PhD students finally throwing in the towel, researchers getting out of research for other reasons (family, ...).
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Really? I doubt it. Sure, changing teams and funding may have a short term effect, but given how world-changing all the "miracle cures" that are announced would be, and that they so rarely pan out, makes me believe nearly all of these exciting breakthroughs have something fundamentally wrong.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  My undergrad students did a research paper on this about 10 years ago (when I was a professor). It turns out that most promising results don’t get followed through for non-scientific reasons, mostly a lack of money. We never published the work (I left academia shortly afterwards), but it certainly was depressing. I do realise the irony of not publishing this work.
  - gus_massa 7y ago
    I was going to ask for a link to the paper ... In particular "mostly lack of money" may mean "the results are not convincing enough to get more funds". In this case they already tried something similar in mice, and they made a small business around the hat, and this is a preliminary safety trial, so I expect that they have a follow up. For me, the results are not very convincing: * They don't have a control group (because it is a safety trial) * They have some improvements in difficult to compare test like the amount of words that the person can remember (it's standardized, but I guess you improve automatically the second time you try it, it's difficult to be sure without a control group) * The blood sample test have a few changes marked as "significant" but they are using a very loose criteria to classify it as significant. The error bars overlap too much with the baseline. So I don't expect that they get good results in a big double blind trial, but negative results are difficult to publish in journals and they almost never get press coverage. Also (in other branches of science) it's standard to have a pipeline of papers. While one paper is published, other is been written and other is in the research part, and there are some brainstorming about what to do next. Once a group has a vein of subjects to publish about, it's much easier to continue with something similar.

cbeach 7y ago

Was it a double blind study?

yxhuvud 7y ago
It was an initial pre-study where the purpose is to determine if it would even be interesting to do a proper study. They didn't even have a nonblind control group. It is still exciting, because most studies of Alzheimers doesn't even pass this initial step from curing mice.

bencollier49 7y ago

There doesn't appear to have been a control group? Perhaps wearing funny hats is good for cognition.

jacobush 7y ago
Either way, that's cool. More research needed. Funny hats is less invasive too.
elliekelly 7y ago
It looks like they considered the "control" to be each patient's baseline measurements before beginning treatment.[1] I would imagine it's also difficult to recruit a healthy control group for these sorts of tests where someone with Alzheimers is probably more willing to accept the risk. [1] https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02958930 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02958930
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  A proper control group would be people with Alzheimers who get the 'procedure' without actually turning the machine on, but everything else the same.
  - mrgreenfur 7y ago
    Is it needed and / or ethical in this case? Alzheimers patients don't spontaneously recover, seems immoral to deny them treatment via a placebo when there is no possibility of improvement from their current state. I'm not a scientist or anything, just curious what normal procedure is here
    - jrochkind1 7y ago
      Obviously you can't give all Alzheimer's patients your experimental drug/treatment that isn't even shown to work yet. That would not make any sense, and would not in fact be ethical. So, yeah, that is how controls work, generally. If there is some other standardly accepted treatment for Alzheimer's already, it might be unethical to _refrain_ from giving that, perhaps the control would be given that too. But it's not unethical not to give someone the treatment that you don't even know if it works yet. Usually. As a general principle. These are certainly interesting things to talk about in the field of medical ethics, and you can find lots of discussion of them in article and such, it's not always totally straightforward or universally agreed upon and of course medical researchers do unethical things all the time. But simply having a control group that does not get the treatment you are researching is not by itself considered unethical. Which seems to be what you are suggesting. Remember that you don't know if the experimental treatment works at all, that's why it's being studied -- it may even make the condition _worse_, or have negative side effects. And yes, having a control group is normal procedure. And that's what a control group is, starting off in the same place as the experimental group, but not receiving the experimental treatment, with other conditions being normalized the same. If the control group is 'double blinded', then neither the subjects nor the research staff know if a given subject is receiving the experimental treatment or control.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

> The MemorEM device is being developed by NeuroEM Therapeutics, and we should point out that two of the authors behind the new study founded the company – so there is some vested commercial interest here. Nevertheless, the results seem promising in spite of the ridiculously small number of participants, and if other researchers are able to replicate them - that is, if the original study has enough details to build a device with identical EM function - and confirm the results, especially the lack of side-effects claimed by the team, this could be great news to all of us.

andy_ppp 7y ago

So I'm pretty skeptical, they are presumably targeting amyloid plaques in the brain with electro-magnetic stimulation. I just think how? Is it a microwave tuned to destroy the proteins or some other means? The mechanism of action seems very very sketchy to me and I just don't believe you can target proteins without hurting other parts of the brain. Anyone with more information on the mechanism of action I'd love to hear it. Until then I'll assume it's just made up.

Cederfjard 7y ago
Here's the research article: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190367 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-...
wereHamster 7y ago
FTA, though I don't have any more detailed information about the process: > Based on the evidence so far, TEMT looks like it can break up the toxic amyloid-beta and tau proteins that have been extensively linked with Alzheimer's – the waves are apparently able to destabilise the weak hydrogen bonds that hold them together.
- hoseja 7y ago
  That sounds like something entirely too unspecific. Amyloid plaques aren't the only thing relying on hydrogen bonds...
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    Many treatments for many diseases do a lot of harm to stuff that we don't want harmed ... chemotherapy, radiotherapy, most of the thousands of drugs have side effects.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    Molecular hydrogen bonding appears to have a medically-interesting effect on cell permeability in the brain, and I'm sure other things. But most hydrogen bond effects are pretty short-lived, while amyloid plaques build up over a long time as the brain fails to remove them as waste. This is obviously hugely preliminary, but it sounds possible that whatever disruption is being caused is at least shorter-term or less destructive than the benefits of counteracting a slow-moving process like Alzheimer's.

nootropicat 7y ago

>at a frequency of 918 MHz If this works, it lends credence to people that think cell and wifi frequencies are not neutral. The fundamental assumption behind neutrality is that the only effect on the human body is thermal.

donquichotte 7y ago
This is different though. It looks like they are using transcranial stimulation, i.e. putting electrodes on both sides of your head and running a current through it, resulting in what I assume to be a quite homogeneous current distribution throughout brain tissue. RF waves' tissue penetration is stronger at the surface of a conductor, see Skin Effect. EDIT: substituting the frequency in [1], we arrive at ~9mm skin depth for 918MHz. [1] http://www.sgoc.de/Download/skin_effect.pdf http://www.sgoc.de/Download/skin_effect.pdf
- Symmetry 7y ago
  They seem to have also been right up against the FCC limit for radio energy exposure at 1.6 W/kg.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

Beltiras 7y ago

Repeat with larger n and a control group. Till then there's no data to validate the effect.

aazaa 7y ago

Worth reading the "Limitations" section of the original paper: > The main limitation of the present study, as with most open-label studies, is that all subjects received treatment (single-arm) without inclusion of an untreated/placebo group. However, the improvements in multiple cognitive measures observed with TEMT would have been highly unlikely to occur spontaneously in AD subjects, even with repeated testing (as discussed above). Moreover, it is difficult to explain away the CSF/plasma changes and DTI/FA localized enhancements, which are consistent with TEMT’s primary mechanisms of action to disaggregate toxic brain oligomers and enhance mitochondrial function. https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad190367 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-... Clearly very preliminary but intriguing work.

ekianjo 7y ago
> Eight mild/moderate AD patients were treated with TEMT in-home by their caregivers for 2 months utilizing a unique head device. Call me skeptical. Mild/moderate AD patients are basically still functional human beings (and pretty hard to diagnose with good accuracy unless you go for expensive brain imaging) that is nothing like "severe" AZ patients. The fact that they knew they were treated by such an invasive device surely has an impact on how they "felt". Of course, they did not use brain imaging (with tau PET tracers) to diagnose such patients: > Subjects had to be diagnosed with mild or moderate AD, according to the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke-Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) criteria. This is the current state of imaging with tau PET tracers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096533/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6096533/ > Tau PET tracers have enabled in vivo quantification of PHF-tau burden in human brains. Tau PET can help in understanding the underlying cause of dementia symptoms, and in patient selection for clinical trials of anti-dementia therapies. Add to the potential for unreliable patient selection the very limited sample size, and you could end up with results that look much better than they actually are.
- 14 7y ago
  I worked in dementia care for a number of years. When we would get a new admission we would do mini mental state exams to determine a sort of baseline as to where they were mentally such as seen here : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/GetPdf.cgi?id=phd001525.1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/gap/cgi-bin/GetPdf.cgi... You would ask things like can you tell me today's date. Do you know what season July is in? I will name 3 items have them repeat them and tell them they need to remember them in a little bit. Then you ask again about those objects and see if they can recall. The test goes on and has a bunch of questions which at the end you score. So I could see them doing something similar in this situation where they test cognitive ability and then retest it a month later. These exams I think would be a pretty good baseline to mark improvement.

rpmisms 7y ago

It seems like anti-aging science is making leaps and bounds lately. First the reversed biological clock study, and now this.

tim333 7y ago

>TEMT looks like it can break up the toxic amyloid-beta and tau proteins that have been extensively linked with Alzheimer's – the waves are apparently able to destabilise the weak hydrogen bonds that hold them together. Is that actually a thing - that you can break up proteins by putting a fairly weak electromagnetic field on them? It sounds like the sort of thing you could test in the kitchen with a coil, oscillator and some half cooked eggs.

farisjarrah 7y ago
I would certainly watch that Youtube video
josephdviviano 7y ago
No, it works because it (very likely) stimulates a very specific kind of brain activity that leads the body to break up the proteins. The article's explanation is incorrect. The experiment itself didn't verify what I just said because it is an invivo clinical study, but if you dig around you can find support for my claim.
- xwolfi 7y ago
  I searched and found a lot of counter arguments to your claim. It seems you're proponent of esoterism and magic thinking, spreading lies against rational double blind large trials. Of course you could make the effort to quote something to back your random nonsense :)
  - 0_gravitas 7y ago
    you could help by quoting the "lot of counter arguments" that you found
  - dang 7y ago
    Personal attacks and flamewar will get you banned here. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart when posting here? We'd be grateful.

throwaway66920 7y ago

Is it suggesting that the current itself breaks down the amyloid plaque? Does this destroy prions?

codesushi42 7y ago

Can this enhance memory for the unimpaired?

randcraw 7y ago

I scanned the article. The authors make no claim that they reversed a year of cognitive decline. Nor did they assess the health of the subjects at any earlier date in order to compare post-treatment performance to that pre-treatment performance to quantify the treatment effect. At most, they idly speculate that on one metric, ONLY THE RESPONDING AD PATIENTS saw as much as 15 months of disease regression (ADAS-cog): "Since a typical decline in ADAS-cog expected for AD subjects is around 4 points over a 12- to 15-month period [48], 2 months of TEMT appears to have reversed cognitive decline (as measured by the ADAS-cog) of responding AD subjects as a group, perhaps back to the cognitive level subjects had 12 to 15 months earlier." Science Alert clearly hyped the story's lead.

graham1776 7y ago

All: Family member recently diagnosed with Early Onset Alz Disease. Articles like this excite us and we desparately want treatments to work (including the hyperbaric chamber, stem cells, dietary changes, the works, etc), but can't help but think following these rabbit trails is only confirmation bias. Does anyone here know of any treatments that actually are worth exploring (ie have actually been studied, but not gained wide-spread adoption). I know this is a shot in the dark but appreciate any new research you could point me to.