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Experimental Alzheimer's Vaccine Shows Promise in Mice
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago[flagged]
- lame-robot-hoax 3y agoWhat
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agoI peered behind the curtain and I cannot lie to myself
- PaulKeeble 3y agoA good solid step. Having produced an animal analogue of Alzheimer's and now come to a vaccine against it showing basic safety and effectiveness in mice is the step towards human trials. Early yet its still years away, but hopefully another awful disease is in the process of being reduced.
- angiosperm 3y agoThe animal analogue of Alzheimer's has been very, very thoroughly demonstrated to be an entire failure for predicting the effect of interventions. Still, studying that failed analogue (to the wholesale exclusion of attention to the actual disease in humans) has been a good career path for an entire generation of biochemists. One wonders what they could pivot to when it is finally abandoned; and what would need to happen before that could be achieved. As it is, those biochemists directly control $2B in grants to themselves, and show little appetite for change.
- fragmede 3y ago[flagged]
- knodi123 3y agoMaybe you should say something about welcoming immortal mouse overlords? Just a thought.
- throwaway743 3y agoPlease don't. It's sad enough seeing the hn comment sections degrade into looking like reddit's
- knodi123 3y agoSorry, I thought the scornful sarcasm came through. I was not actually giving someone advice on which puns they should make.
- fragmede 3y ago> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kjksf 3y agoIt merely slows progress of Alzheimer i.e. stops progress of brain inflammation. Strange that they call it a vaccine. Nomenclature aside, it's even better to not develop the inflammation in the first place. And it can be done with a simple (but difficult) change: stop eating insane amounts of sugar and carbs that most people eat in standard American / western diet. This prevents diabetes (because diabetes is "too much glucose in your blood" disease and not eating sugar (glucose) and carbs (are converted to glucose by our body). Elevated levels of glucose trigger elevated levels of insulin. If it persists for long periods of time, it causes inflammation in our body, including brain. This inflammation caused by diabetes is believed to be main cause of Alzheimer. Some scientists even call Alzheimer a Type 3 diabetes. As to "insane amounts of sugar": you probably consume insane amount of sugar without knowing your doing it. The optimal amount of glucose in our blood in 3 grams, which is 6 grams of sugar. A daily recommended dose of sugar is 25 grams for women and 36 for men. A single can of coca-cola is 33 grams of sugar. That's more than a daily sugar budget for a woman and almost daily budget for a man. An average consumption by an American is 76.7 grams i.e. 2x daily recommended dose.
- Narretz 3y ago> This inflammation caused by diabetes is believed to be main cause of Alzheimer then please don't start your comment as if this is verifiable fact
- asow92 3y agoThis is a real and open debate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246646/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246646/
- saltymug76 3y agoI'm glad that in the face of decades of research, you boiled avoiding Alzheimer's down to just a few paragraphs. Well done!
- bitwize 3y agoMedical science is just catching up to the fact that diet is the major cause of major non-pathogenic disease behind alcohol and tobacco consumption. It's taken so long because the medical and pharmaceutical industries prefer to treat disease rather than prevent or cure it with proper nutrition, and the food industry wants to keep you addicted.
- reissbaker 3y agoWe've cured "Alzheimer's in mice" over and over again. Sadly our mouse model for Alzheimer's has not proven to be a good model for Alzheimer's in humans.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- resoluteteeth 3y agoI definitely wouldn't hold my breath on this vaccine working but it's different from the drugs targeting beta amyloid plaques and it's still possible it will work. Even if the animal model they tested it using is suspect, the theory behind drug itself (targeting senescent cells) is plausible. I wouldn't give it more than a 10% chance but without other effective alzheimer's drugs even a small chance like that is absolutely still worth doing clinical trials on.
- angiosperm 3y agoThey bred up a mouse that gets something that looks like Alzheimer's, and is very easy to cure it in. In the US, most of two billion dollars annually goes for grants just to study this mouse. Vanishingly few grantees ever so much as peek at anything in or from human patients. Of course there is plenty still to learn about that mouse, as about any organism, but what has been far more thoroughly demonstrated than most medical results is that, appearances aside, Alzheimer's in that mouse is very unlike in humans. The only intervention I know of that shows robust results preventing Alzheimers is having been recently vaccinated. It doesn't seem to matter much for what, but several population studies, involving tens of thousands of patients and controlling for lifestyle confounders, show a reliable 40% reduction in dementia risk for people recently vaccinated for TDaP. Nobody will talk about it, apparently because it is embarrassing to have no clue why it works. (Pressed, people mumble about inflammation.) And, of course, no money is spent figuring it out, or figuring out why vaccination doesn't seem to help the other 60%. Work in other countries has implicated herpes virus, and got good outcomes from valacyclovir, again provoking little interest from US researchers. Whenever it, somehow, becomes possible to divert those two billion dollars to somewhere they might do some good for Alzheimer's patients, a whole population of biochemists who only know about brain metabolism in that mouse will need to find something else to do. In the meantime, they get to allocate the money to themselves.
- jsisto 3y agoThis is great news for mice with Alzheimer’s
- gumby 3y agoDon’t be so heartless. I’m sure there are lots of them than there are humans.
- angiosperm 3y agoMaybe not so many mice will develop their peculiar breed's brand of Alzheimer's. It is hard to believe there can be more than 10M of those at any time. Their entire lineage could disappear in a year without continuous support, and then no mice would suffer it.
- gumby 3y agoGood point, I was off by several orders of magnitude. Clearly the most ethical thing to do is to “destroy the village in order to save it”
- getarofilter 3y ago[dead]
- jasfi 3y agoFrom the article: "It’s intended to work by training the immune system to go after certain senescent cells, aging cells that no longer divide to make more of themselves, but instead stick around in the body. These cells aren’t necessarily harmful, and *some play a vital role in healing and other life functions*." Emphasis mine. It sounds like there could be major side-effects from this vaccine, possibly undetectable in mice. It would still be interesting to see how this progresses though.