3 ms·

I don't know why these studies keep getting funded. Here is how they (generally) work: You take a mouse and cure it's Alzheimer's, right? Except mice don't l

I don't know why these studies keep getting funded. Here is how they (generally) work: You take a mouse and cure it's Alzheimer's, right? Except mice don't live 70 years, and even if they did you can't wait 70 years for Alzheimer's mice to test drugs on. So you inject poison into the mouse's brain so it kindof has Alzheimer's like symptoms. Well, that's not even quite right, since you can't tell if a mouse has Alzheimer's like symptoms or just generalized brain damage (it's a mouse, you can't ask it if it can remember what year it is or what their kids names are, you can only see if they can remember which cup the cheese is under, well actually you can't even test that, just whether they behave like a healthy mouse would if it remembered, or some other really poor proxy for the sort of cognitive test you would use to diagnose Alzheimer's in humans) , but whatever, you have all these mice and someone is paying to inject them with poison so what can you do? Then you treat the poison damage with a drug, and get results ... but later it doesn't work on Alzheimer's in humans at all because human Alzheimer's isn't brain damage from poison injected into the brain.

biolurker1 6y ago
Don't they selecte mice that got alz naturally?
- yxhuvud 6y ago
  Mice don't get alz. So they have bred strains of mice that get similar symptoms and try the medications on that.
- ltbarcly3 6y ago
  There are transgenic mice where they have spliced genes to cause disease, but to me this is not a probable way to learn how to cure Alzheimer's. The reason is, there are very limited choices in which mouse line to use. You basically have to pick from a menu of transgenic mice from some supplier. So you would have to be lucky enough that a supplier breeding transgenic mice just happens to have picked, with an educated lucky guess, a combination of genes that expresses a disease enough like Alzheimer's when spliced into a non-human host that something that has some effect on the mouse disease also has an effect on the human disease, compounded with being lucky enough to find a treatment for the mouse disease at all, compounded with the luck of picking that mouse line from the menu of dozens of mouse lines with human genes spliced in. So lets say a time traveler from the year 2321 hands you a vial with the cure for Alzheimer's in it, and you want to test if it works. So you open the mouse catalog, and you see a dozen transgenic mice choices. Lets say, by some cosmic coincidence, one of those mouse lines out of the dozen choices, again by luck since it's unlikely that out of a couple of spliced genes they would ever happen upon a mouse line that it would ever work, has the right gene that coincidentally the human cure will also work on that line of mice. By far the most likely outcome (11/12 times) is you order mice, they are acting like they have a brain disease, you inject them with the future cure and it doesn't help them at all. This is when you know for a fact you do have a cure for humans. This is why I'm saying these mouse studies are a waste of money and research effort. If you have a cure for Alzheimer's the mice are very unlikely to show improvement, and things that improve the behavior of the mice are incredibly unlikely to work in humans. So why do they do it? Well, there is a big pool of money available to study Alzheimer's and there are catalogs with mice in them, and you can inject mice with whatever random thing you want without a lot of 'having a reason it might work'. It's like the guy looking for his keys under a street light. When you ask him if that's where he lost his keys he says "No, I lost them way over there." Ok why not look where the keys might be? "It's too dark to see over there". In this case, it's "we don't know how to do an experiment that might be useful but there is funding and we can order mice".

biolurker1 6y ago

Don't they selecte mice that got alz naturally?

yxhuvud 6y ago
Mice don't get alz. So they have bred strains of mice that get similar symptoms and try the medications on that.
ltbarcly3 6y ago
There are transgenic mice where they have spliced genes to cause disease, but to me this is not a probable way to learn how to cure Alzheimer's. The reason is, there are very limited choices in which mouse line to use. You basically have to pick from a menu of transgenic mice from some supplier. So you would have to be lucky enough that a supplier breeding transgenic mice just happens to have picked, with an educated lucky guess, a combination of genes that expresses a disease enough like Alzheimer's when spliced into a non-human host that something that has some effect on the mouse disease also has an effect on the human disease, compounded with being lucky enough to find a treatment for the mouse disease at all, compounded with the luck of picking that mouse line from the menu of dozens of mouse lines with human genes spliced in. So lets say a time traveler from the year 2321 hands you a vial with the cure for Alzheimer's in it, and you want to test if it works. So you open the mouse catalog, and you see a dozen transgenic mice choices. Lets say, by some cosmic coincidence, one of those mouse lines out of the dozen choices, again by luck since it's unlikely that out of a couple of spliced genes they would ever happen upon a mouse line that it would ever work, has the right gene that coincidentally the human cure will also work on that line of mice. By far the most likely outcome (11/12 times) is you order mice, they are acting like they have a brain disease, you inject them with the future cure and it doesn't help them at all. This is when you know for a fact you do have a cure for humans. This is why I'm saying these mouse studies are a waste of money and research effort. If you have a cure for Alzheimer's the mice are very unlikely to show improvement, and things that improve the behavior of the mice are incredibly unlikely to work in humans. So why do they do it? Well, there is a big pool of money available to study Alzheimer's and there are catalogs with mice in them, and you can inject mice with whatever random thing you want without a lot of 'having a reason it might work'. It's like the guy looking for his keys under a street light. When you ask him if that's where he lost his keys he says "No, I lost them way over there." Ok why not look where the keys might be? "It's too dark to see over there". In this case, it's "we don't know how to do an experiment that might be useful but there is funding and we can order mice".