Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?(freakonomics.com) |
Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?(freakonomics.com) |
Scientist Ruth Itzhaki spent years studying a far more promising theory of Alzheimer's: that it's caused by viral infection in the brain, particularly HSV-1, best known for causing cold sores. Most have it, so there are clearly other factors at work, likely related to susceptibility in particular individuals to to the virus infecting the brain and spreading over time. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34205498/
The implication is that anti-viral treatments are likely to inhibit and potentially cure Alzheimer's. There is already unintended evidence along these lines, both via antiviral drugs and vaccines.
If you're looking to beat type-3 diabetes, you need to have a daily routine of exercise while you're young to keep these systems in shape when you're old.
You also don't need to belong to any marginalized groups, as ACEs tend to wear your body out over time -- breathing, kidneys, and heart in particular. People with traumatic childhoods (bullying, abusive parents, etc) have a huge risk of dying of dementia -- if their kidneys don't give out first.
I think you’re making a giant leap from A to Z and missing a whole bunch in between.
Stress ages the body. Homeless people can age several years, being on the streets for just a few months.
I've also seen numerous people in these upbringings die in their 50s and 60s from kidney failure. My stepdad was one of them. My father too.
My father had a normal childhood, except he had a traumatic experience of shooting his twin brother while they were playing cowboys and indians. Spent his entire life blaming himself. Went through all the normal development phases. Not on any meds.
His body just started shutting down prematurely. It's common in people with those experiences. First, his breathing got bad. Then his kidneys. Then he started having heart problems.
And that's the pattern. Heart, lungs, kidneys. Which are all linked to the brain. And eventually lead to dementia-like symptoms. At least that's what the research on ACEs seems to point out.
Marginalized people have a high death rate in their 50s and 60s, because of societal bullshit -- no other factors needed.
which is linked to nervous and endocrine dysfunction,
which is linked to Alzheimer’s/Dementia?
Meaning, failing of the glymphatic (and possibly lymphatic!) systems.
The President is singlehandedly kept this side of functional via infusions of this drug each month
https://beingpatient.com/fda-alzheimers-leqembi-nih-memo-tru...
They mysteriously rushed approval despite all other activity suspended the week after he was sworn-in
Watch how he disappears for a few days each month, that's why, it can only be done in a hospital and they have to do MRI for leakage
Next question.
Alzheimer is very important, and affects a very large number of people, it is getting lots of research funding and attention, but perhaps not enough? If it takes a certain combination of time, human-hours, money, and lots of smart people being interested in doing research in that field. Is the economics of disease research that simple? it is unknown what numeration of those variables is required to tackle Alzheimers, but if it is a lot more than cancer for example, then it might be decades or more away from being well understood.
I hate to say it, but cancer and HIV feel more like things we can get, Alzheimers feels like something only old people get, and it's to easy to forget that we'll get old, and it's hard to think our older loved ones might be affected. If no one in your sphere has been affected, it's harder to prioritize the disease.
My opinion is, money is the biggest obstacle, and I don't mean money for research, but money for education for researchers, and the talent pipeline. If higher education (at least for medicine) was literally free, that'd be a start. then you need lots of people getting paid to do the research independently. Right now, it feels like most disease research is being done by big pharma, so they can find the next insulin they can use to maximize profits. The incentives are all wrong on all sides, for potential researchers, the public and R&D companies.
> and it's hard to think our older loved ones might be affected
A large proportion of people don’t need to think about it because they have witnessed the horrific effects on loved ones first hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early-onset_Alzheimer%27s_dise...
Depending on what you consider "old", this might not change much
I'm pretty adamant it was fraud. You don't have to look very hard to see how profit incentives are fucking up the health/medical sector. Check out how often $1000+/dose drug goes generic and within +/- 3 months a study is published that reveals it can be strongly linked to any number of issues that would have caused it to never get approved in the first place. Then you look at the original studies and see they specifically excluded anyone that those problems would have shown up in!
If you study effects and not causes due to lack of measurements for reproducibility in any field of research, that's what comes out.
Also check out how the new and promising correlation started by observing the Wales eligibility for mandatory shingles vaccination during an outbreak and the effect on that test group when it comes to alzheimer or dementia in their old age.
Note that shingles (herpes zoster) virus is a dormant virus for decades, and it's not really treated because of that.
Also note that this was only discovered because people died and their data set was publicized because of that, which I hope that can happen in an anonymous way due to it being invaluable for medical research.
[1] https://www.alzheimer-europe.org/news/analysis-electronic-he...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11485228/
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
[4] https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/shingles-vaccine...
We were introduced to the head of neuroscience at Houston Methodist as part of our due diligence process; his entire career was built upon the removal of plaque from the brain and would not even consider an alternative theory. We ran into this for years. It made funding the trials very difficult. We were totally ignored by all the Alzheimer's charities and orgs (ie Seth Rogan's for example). Only the Michael J. Fox foundation contributed early on.
However, our drug, now known as Zunveyl, was a pro-drug of already on the market Galanatmine, which was the second most commonly prescribed drug in the world for this disease (about $6BN/yr). Our pro-drug almost eliminated the side effects of Galanamine (nausea, vomiting) and enabled us to increase dosage high enough to actually get enough molecules into the brain. It was (is) awesome. Some of our first clinical trials were healthy young adults - they did extremely well. I don't think I can share the actual results but I hope that we (or someone) can fund a study to get approval for "regular people" usage one day given how well this test went. Later tests went just a well but only thanks to the "fast track" program were we able to even get to market.
Even today after being on the market for about a year now, the market uptake is slow due to insurance company approvals. We are getting reorders like crazy but often new patients get denied initially and then doctors have to appeal and then they get approved. This has been taking about 6 months on average and is brutal for people with the disease (and their families). Since getting a drug to patients is actually a (sadly and surprisingly) large sales and marketing expense, the company (Alpha Cognition) is focusing on long-term-care centers for now, but we had always hoped that this would be available much more broadly and much faster. Several of the early investor's parents were alive and afflicted with this disease when we started, but have since passed away. I hope that we can get this out and help others - faster.
The mother company that spun this out is also working on other molecules to try to stop Alzheimer's itself, rather than "only" help with symptoms but as always funding is a challenge. Clinical trials must be done correctly and are thus expensive.
Been living this battle for 15+ years and hoped that this can shed a little light on how things have been.
Or maybe virus activity is one way that a negative feedback loop involving protein aggregates can begin...
A lot of virological and parasitical components have historically been wrongly associated with genetic markers, too. Toxoplasmosis parasite comes to mind.
Well, they seem to have some champions here...
About the question: Alzheimer’s disease is a condition of the elderly, and they’re on their way out anyway. That is what I observe. Healthcare is a moneymaking business. In capitalism. While it should be free. And excluded from patenting or copyrighting. Healthcare has turned into wealthcare. No wealth? Game over. No extra life for you. On the other hand, maybe the subject is just so complicated for today’s scientists. It is all in the eye of the beholder. The existence of F1 racing cars doesn’t mean that Tesla will never be part of Formula One’s future. As we speak there’s already one Tesla racing through space…
Alzheimer's is basically an advanced form of gum disease caused by Porphyromonas gingivalis) that has infiltrated into your jaw and then traveled into your brain where it causes systemic inflammation which in turn lets other pathogens in that cause neurodegeneration.
There is probably no cure because the only thing you can do in dentistry is prevention and preventative dentistry is still in its infancy.
This is probably wasted on the HN crowd though, because I haven't seen any demand for preventing Alzheimer's.
Disclaimer : I work as the CTO at BetterBrain
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/commissions-do/dementia-prevention...
Sometimes any diet.
Mental health struggles can exacerbate, (and be exacerbated by!) forgetting to eat, not wanting to eat,
forgetting or passing up the things that keep you in homeostasis, choosing the less correct things because of an emotional response, a physiological response in a “diminished” state.
Protective against the problem is anything which keeps you mentally active, such as socialization, work, religious community participation, hobbies, and meditation. Retirement, death of partner, isolation, sleep deprivation, depression, dissociation, psychosis, medications/drugs which interfere with restful sleep increase risk.
A possible falsification of this hypothesis would be if it's caused by inactivity or physical self neglect, as those often go hand in hand with the correlated and anti-correlated factors mentioned above.
This is particularly interesting:
> Intriguingly, studies show conscientiousness and neuroticism to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias but not with their pathologic hallmarks such as plaques, tangles, infarcts or Lewy bodies in the brain.
The research went awry in Alziemer's due to fraud but its being funded at a reasonable level, a level many with Long Covid or ME/CFS or Fibromylgia would be very happy to see but doubt will ever happen. Funding of diseases is not "fair", it isn't based on number of sufferers * quality life years lost and we should be spending more on medical research generally. Alzeimers is one of the better funded diseases in the world.
I'll probably be downvoted for this, but I honestly think quality of life of CFS is lower than Alzheimer's.
I truly wish that disease funding was based on science and metrics rather than marketing and vibes.
That being said, Alzheimer's absolutely deserves it's funding and it is very sad to see setbacks related to fraud.
Except early onset Alzheimers happens and it also happens to plenty of people for which none of those are true.
What I did when I stated this is looked at a number of observations from current literature and asked a what-if question. People unwilling to ask these questions are blinding themselves to entire areas of possible explanations. My hope when posting this was that people might engage with the idea instead of calling it a guess. Retirement, isolation from pandemic lockdowns, isolation from solitary imprisonment, and isolation from death of a partner are all associated with cognitive decline.
There's enough correlation here that it would be worth researching. That's all I am saying, I am specifically not saying my claim is factual just that it is a possible explanation that if true would explain a lot.
Clearly viral infection may be a distal factor but it is not the proximate cause of Alzheimer's... which is quite conclusively due to protein aggregates.
Protein aggregates seem like the effect, with many causes.
"Neuron death by protein aggregates" is the best way to define Alzheimer's. Anything more specific refers to only one of those aforementioned causes; anything less is just "brain don't work no more."
These clickbait headlines are so frustrating, especially since the article itself explains the tau mechanism and all the progress that has been made in understanding the disease.
Context for old people in assisted living: https://www.metabolicmind.org/resources/news-views/podcasts/...
Not sure what you are trying to achieve with comments like this, besides intentional gas lighting.
Could've commented with links to scientific articles or papers that disprove my theory.
Instead you chose to be ... this?
Not sure if you are trolling at this point.
Dropping this thread now. I am fine with being wrong, but my brief posting was not trolling.
and other chronic illnesses,
that the consumer-facing medical industry prefers to dismiss.
Whether it was fraudulent or just incorrect is a different question. We don’t know all of the details of human biology. We don’t even know what all we don’t know. Most guesses work to some degree to keep pharma alive - otherwise nobody would fund the business.
Edit: Google the in the pipeline blog. This and other have discussed this at length.
I thought despite the fraud, it's still the best model we have[1]? The fact there was fraud doesn't mean the model is immediately incorrect. At best, it means its foundations are shakier than we thought, but it's not a slam dunk repudiation.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
The problem us "consensus science". You could get funding to research beta amyloids, but not to research any competing hypotheses.
It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
If anyone wants to know who wrote the article linked before wasting time reading it, there you go.
> I thought despite the fraud, it's still the best model we have[1]?
It is observed that one of the features of neurodegenerative diseases is decline in glucose metabolism. Supplementing energy availability (e.g. ketones [1], creatine [2]) does improve symptoms in patients with wide variety of CNS diseases, including Alzheimer's, senile dementia, epilepsy, and migraines.
The ATN model you have linked might as well be just ONE OF possible pathways to glucose uptake inhibition, which could be the causal pathology of the symptoms.
So no, it is very much not necessarily the best model we have. Inhibiting any pathway towards a disease is always a good thing, but the characteristics of "best" models are broad applicability and we have a serious contender.
[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1016/j.nurt.2008.05.004 [2]: https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.100...
What happened is we got the tools to start studying viral associations with other diseases and ... whooops ... suddenly there are associations. The shingles and RSV vaccines seem to affect dementia while others like influenza don't.
Now people can ask questions about why those particular vaccines affect dementia while others don't. And suddenly we have falsifiable tests.
Now we can subject all hypotheses (including Amyloid) to stronger scrutiny.
Derek Lowe's blog is excellent, with 192 posts tagged "Alzheimer's Disease":
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/alzheimers-disea...
And, on a more entertaining topic:
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
"But I have to admit, I'd never thought much about the next analog of hydrogen peroxide. Instead of having two oxygens in there, why not three: HOOOH? Indeed, why not? This is a general principle that can be extended to many other similar situations. Instead of being locked in a self-storage unit with two rabid wolverines, why not three? Instead of having two liters of pyridine poured down your trousers, why not three? And so on - it's a liberating thought. It's true that adding more oxygen-oxygen bonds to a compound will eventually liberate the tiles from your floor and your windows from their frames, but that comes with the territory."
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
And probably the more important question. How badly is the machine that does science broken? If we don’t focus here and fix it, there will be further decades without progress, all while wasting further billions.
Tautology statement. "We don't know all the details of X" for any X.
Sorry but good science should be reproducible an given the amount of major retractions around this field I think this starts to become more than a passing question.
Lots of work is built on top of the model which means a lot of money change hands and a lot of honesty hard work was done.
Those who built the bad model should be being asked why a) they were so wrong (bad conclusions are fine) b) their data was so bad (this is not defensible) c) they didn't push for reproducing their work sooner to support the field (more of a daming statement of a field which treats a statistical analysis as a push button tool)...
Somewhat ironic given the context.
To be clearer, Pharma is chasing a nice long treatment plan, that will require expensive drugs till the end. Pharma does not heal - this is not good for business. So there are criteria around what they are searching for.
This is a trope regurgitated by people who don't know any better. It would imply that pharma are deliberately avoiding research directions that would generate cures, or (even worse) discovering cures and putting them in a dark secret safe somewhere.
The reality is that drug development is serendipitous and really hard, and any company seeing even a sniff of a drug that works will throw everything behind making that drug a success. During the early stages of investigation of a promising new agent, the animal data can't predict much, and certainly can't predict whether something is "curative" - this would only be seen during human trials, after which hiding that benefit would be close to impossible. It's just not how it works.
There are plenty of examples of actual (rather than functional) cures being developed and marketed:
1) Previously-untreated DLBCL (a type of blood cancer) can be cured. CHOP chemotherapy cured ~35-40% of cases. The addition of rituximab boosted that to 60-65%. There then followed a long string of failed phase III studies (probably billions spent, cumulatively) trying to beat rituximab + CHOP, and finally in recent years there has been some success. So: multiple attempts across multiple pharma companies, trying to improve on an already impressive cure rate... not much evidence of an anti-cure conspiracy.
2) Hepatitis C - cures were discovered and marketed from ~2014 onwards; now ~95% of cases can be cured with a treatment lasting only a couple of months. So: multiple treatments, from multiple pharma companies, which offer a hugely effective cure for a pretty unpleasant disease.
From the human perspective, researchers are people, and they do have their incentives. Making a breakthrough, of any kind, is important for them - even if for their career (but many do genuinely care and want to help humanity as a whole).
From marketing and sales perspective, look at what happen to pharma companies capitalization when Ozempic appeared: a relatively small Elly Lily suddenly got bigger then Merck, Novartis, Roche or Johnson & Johnson. You can hardly call it a long treatment plan with expensive drugs "till the end".
Really, there is a lot of bad things going on in healthcare and pharma industry, but the conspiracy theory "they don't want to invent efficient drugs" really makes no sense when you dig deeper.
"Despite being described as a “cabal,” the amyloid camp was neither organized nor nefarious. Those who championed the amyloid hypothesis truly believed it, and thought that focusing money and attention on it rather than competing ideas was the surest way to an effective drug.
It has not worked out that way. Research focused on amyloid, and the development and testing of experimental drugs targeting it, have sucked up billions of dollars in government, foundation, and pharma funding with nothing to show for it. While targeting amyloid may or may not be necessary to treat Alzheimer’s, it is not sufficient, and the additional steps almost certainly include those that were ignored, even censored. Probably the most shattering turn came in March, when Biogen halted the study of what proponents called the most promising Alzheimer’s drug in years — an amyloid-targeting antibody."
I still refer to this article seven years later. Groupthink in the medical research space sets back progress by decades. And it's not just Alzheimers. The FDA's approval process is stymied by a CYA culture that fails to adopt the risk profile it needs to in order to potentially save large contingents of sick and dying.
Karl Herrup has a terrific book on the topic How Not to Study a Disease — The Story of Alzheimer’s from MIT Press (2021, ISBN 9780262045902). He did not win many friends but I think he is right.
The consensus now is that many factors contribute to the heterogeneous diseases we now call Alzheimer’s.
People love to praise “the science” when they mean the scientific method. What they always seem to forget is that method is executed by humans. Imperfect, sometimes ego driven humans.
The research is still in the very early stages (largely mouse models, though they did develop the hypothesis by looking at differences in human brain tissue post mortem), but to me my biggest fear is that little research will be done because the "cure" is a commonly available, non-patentable supplement, lithium orotate.
As someone in middle age with a family history of dementia, I've decided to start taking lithium orotate because the risk/reward profile looks so good from my perspective. Lithium orotate has been sold as a supplement for decades, and at those levels it is very safe with extremely-small-to-no chance of adverse effects (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027323002...), so I figure the worst that can happen is I'm wasting my money, but I'd take that for even the small chance that it helps ward off dementia.
The fact that amyloid-beta binding drugs like Lecanemab and Donanemab decrease progression is also very strong evidence for the amyloid-beta hypothesis.
What seemed to be the hurdle was likely, that targeting amyloid-beta in its pathological form just wasn't easy and developers of pharmaceuticals instead focused (for unknown reasons) on the solid amyloid-beta grains in the brain.
The major reason things are moving so slowly is because of the long development times of pharmaceutical compounds. A new compound will at least have to spend 2-3 years in safety studies before being tested on its first real patient, and then for Alzheimer's, which is a slowly developing disorder, nothing short of a 2-year followup time will show efficacy unless it's truly a miracle compound.
[0] https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD016297_are-medicines-ant...
While these two classes of drugs target the same molecule, they are developed to target amyloid-beta in very different forms. Pooling all those drugs together, and then showing very weak effect, makes absolutely zero sense, and I hope and expect this review to be pulled soon.
It's legimate as people with DS have a hugely increased risk of AD. Their risk increase seems likely related specifically to Amyloid. Many with DS can consent to it.
In general my completely gut feeling is that once we can target Tau we might find that targeting amyloid is needed to fully curtail progression.
Alzheimer's (like a gazillion other diseases) is a product of senescence, and senescence is a subject that faces strong ideological headwinds. That leaves the medical system in a situation where they want to treat the symptoms (the diseases) instead of the root cause, and treating the set of symptoms that we call Alzheimer's is going to be tough.
The insider joke is that the “A” in NIA stands for Alzheimer’s. The deeper and sadder joke: when you fit cognitive trajectories within the subset of people who go on to develop AD, about half of the variance in their test scores is accounted for by chronological age alone.
We’re spending seven times more on the disease than on the clock — and the disease is mostly the aging clock.
Go figure.
NIH is great at tactical research but terrible at strategic research, and politicians do not help much ;-)
Alzheimer's isn't a single-point-of-failure disease, more like a dysregulation of maintenance. So there are lots of things that can tip the odds one way or another, and we may get a lot better at prevention - to the point of reducing incidence maybe five-fold, or delaying its symptomatic onset to beyond the relevant lifespan - but the idea that there might be a single "cure" seems like wishful thinking.
It may also prove to be that, like a spinning-top, once things start to go off-axis it may be very difficult to restore the original stable state, and at most we can just slow it down a bit.
Perhaps more uncomfortable, if most of the effective interventions, risk-reduction-wise, are social/lifestyle related, that has implications for whether people have the agency to access those things.
(Time/energy/facilities/resources for exercise/active lifestyle being an obvious case in point, which is already well known to have a moderate protective effect).
Alzheimer's disease may occur either due to inherited mutations in the genes for APP or presenilin, in which case it can occur as young as 40 yrs old. Or it may occur "sporadically" in those over 65yrs old. The brain pathology of both is similar. Notably, amyloid is derived from APP in part by the action of presenilin, which cuts the APP protein to release the amyloid peptide (Aβ).
Currently, the amyloid hypothesis is the only known way to reconcile the similarity of pathology (for both amyloid and tau) between early onset inherited AD caused by mutations in either APP or presenilin, and later onset sporadic disease. Furthermore, all the mutations in APP that cause Alzheimer's disease are located within or adjacent to the region that corresponds to Aβ amyloid, and not in the remaining 95% of the molecule.
Until another way of unifying these observations is found, the amyloid hypothesis will always find supporters.
For decades, the industry standard was to hunt for targeted small molecules to solve singular biological issues. And to be fair, I don't think this was because of a lack of vision as it was simply the strict limit of our technological capabilities at the time. But attempting to treat a cascading, systemic disease like Alzheimer's with a single targeted molecule is like hoping replacing one pipe will solve the problem when the issue is that the entire plumbing system is corroding.
This fundamental mismatch is exactly why clinical progress has stalled, and I believe the future of treating Alzheimer's will instead closely mirror how our approach to oncology has evolved.
We spent years searching for a universal molecule to cure cancer before we accepted reality. We now know that effective treatment often requires sequencing a tumor's mutanome to develop a highly personalized intervention for the individual. As neurodegenerative systems fail with age, we face that exact same biological complexity. A traditional small molecule is not going to rescue a globally failing network.
My personal take is that we won't see a true breakthrough in Alzheimer's until capital fully rotates out of these legacy, single-target pipelines and into programmable biological systems.
When a topic only has a limited number of experts, those experts become gatekeepers.
Those gatekeepers directly or indirectly control research funding.
Gatekeepers necessarily harbor biases, some right and some wrong, about how the field should progress.
For Alzheimer's, some gatekeepers were conflicted and potentially directed the field in the wrong direction. Only time will reveal AB42's true role.
It's easy to find fault in Alzheimer's.
It's harder to see the general solution to the gatekeeper problem, i.e., how to allocate resources in areas with limited experts.
I like to view degeneration of any tissue as death due to (premature) aging. So, if we treat it, we achieve immortality by applying it to all body. This is something hard.
Possibly the most likely possibility?
1. It acts on the brain, one of the organs we understand the least.
2. It's relatively slow acting, and easy to miss in the early stages.
3. It impacts the older population which will have confounding health factors.
4. It doesn't fit neatly into a big category we already know a lot about, like infection or cancer.
The slow acting nature of it means also you have to wait a long time to see results of clinical trials; also because early stages are easy to miss that also means you are stuck studying people who are already pretty senile and thus might be beyond the point where you can make a big difference.
Ruxandra has a nice piece, focused on cancer, but the reasoning is basically the same here: biology is just really hard. Sometimes we get lucky but in general it's a long, slow slog.
[1] https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-biologists-c...
Think of it like brushfire in an ecosystem, or species population imbalances leading to catastrophic breakdown. These are better understood in terms of system state and preconditions, as opposed to a trigger event.
Infectious disease, at least in the classic acute form (whether that's bacterial and fast - cholera - or viral and slow - HIV), is a more mechanistic process which can be halted by blocking a single step in its pathway.
Systems that remain healthy and balanced via dynamic processes are harder to reason about and fix, because the root cause of a disease state can be dozens of little things adding up to the system losing its ability to maintain homeostasis.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amateur-armed-wit...
Just like that math problem, we are starting off with wrong thinking right from the beginning. Some researchers are already talking about this but the plaques are actually a protective response to a metabolic problem in the brain which has to do with glucose transport.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8772148/
This is why people with dementia and Alzheimer's crave sweets so much:
https://helpdementia.com/why-dementia-patients-crave-sweets-...
Alzheimer's is not a neurological problem, it is a metabolic problem.
https://www.bellyofthebeastcuba.com/us-citizens-in-cuba-for-...
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/us-hardens-sanctions-targe...
I'm dealing with someone with this disease now and it's absolutely hell.
That's also why Alzheimer's can take so long to develop. It's just one aspect that we've chosen to focus on because it's more clearly noticeable, but it cannot easily be treated in isolation from everything else. If it was, it would regress quickly without fixing the root causes.
Even the most unwell person (in the US) is still dragging themselves to the store and work, on average.
Simple, brief movement that we often relieve the elderly of is the pump that actions the lymphatic system.
Being older brings its own additions to the table.
But fair, improved biomarker data does not mean the drug is making any real improvements for the patients especially with the side effects. But it is also well known.
Except the history of FDA approval here is that it has been too accepting of drug candidates for Alzheimers with very weak evidence of efficacy and serious side effects. This particular field would probably be better off if the FDA took a harder position on efficacy, rather than deferring to drug companies and patient/caregiver groups that desperately want something.
Instead, at the start of a treatment on a patient, an analysis must be done of all available data, and the treatment only allowed if the error bars put it within the realm of the best treatment available.
That means at the start when not much data is available, it is easy to give it to a patient. But over time as more data comes in it gets harder and harder to do so if the treatment is ineffective or harmful.
Data should be collected and analyzed in real-time - it should be a matter of hours between some life event like a death feeding into the dataset used for decisions on new patients.
The harm was done by the groupthink and the sucking up of resources to research alternative causes. One of the comments on HN when that statnews article was first linked was by a commenter who worked on Alzheimer's. They agreed and I remember the line, (something to the effect of) "if you wanted funding for alternative investigations, you had to still throw a bone to beta amyloid in your proposal."
Was it all a waste? No. Current thought is beta amyloid is still involved, but Alzheimer's is multicausal. What those other causes are is in its investigation infancy. We could have started investigating those decades ago if the scientific research complex were truly open to new ideas.
Otherwise we just need to hope that we live long enough and don't catch ALZ until the current ruling peer group pass.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8772148/
This is why APoE e4 alleles are a risk factor, because they control glucose transport.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-025-03550-w
The brain is just losing energy.
Earlier today I read a comment here mentioning Dr Michael Nehls who writes about lithium and also dementia (highly recommend his books). Now that comment is no longer there. Hmmm.
I experiment and take a small number of less-commonly-known supplements and those kind of studies _in itself_ should never contribute to “it’s safe for humans”.
Anecdata: my personal brain/body didn’t react too well to 1mg a day, I felt somewhat ‘sluggish’ and found concentrating harder, so I stopped after 2 days out of being conservative. Perhaps I’d get used to it, but for me personally, I was surprised at the effects of just 1mg so I didn’t want to continue taking it.
My point being, if that was the only safety study done on a brand new substance, I'd agree with you, but the safety profile really boils down to the decades of human use as a supplement.
All that said, I totally agree that many more human studies are needed to determine the actual efficacy of lithium orotate in preventing or reversing dementia.
My grandmother lived to 102 and was mentally sharp right up until she died. She also smoked daily into her 90s.
Perhaps funding like public grants could be controlled by few? Should not the case for private money?
Relatively common health issues older people tend to get fair amount of private funding after all.
Rich people tend to be older and they are lot more likely to see amongst their friends and family Alzheimer's and Parkison's or even cancer and so forth and be worried about it and thus donate money to them.
In somewhat related (i.e. old people health concerns) life extension research gets all kinds of wacky non traditional research lines get funded all the time, I don't understand why would Alzheimer's would be any different.
Generally, you rely on experts.
Who typically became experts by adhering to the conventional wisdom set by gatekeepers.
"Science advances one funeral at a time" feels apt.
Sadly, the problem isn't confined to Alzheimer's.
Whenever only a few people decide what is "right," the same pattern of stifled innovation will generally manifest itself not by design or from malice, but because it's hard for a small group to be 100% right on what works and what doesn't -- especially on matters as inscrutable as neuroimmune diseases.
The takeaway is to stop pretending that we can do good science when the ambiguity is so high, the majority of funding should go to people working on more concrete problems. We never locked in on vacuum tubes because the downsides were so obvious and the upsides of silicon transistors (if they could be made to work) were also obvious even to people outside the field, where your talent comes from. At the very least funders can't allow shifting goalposts, make them up front answer questions about the drugs. That will give you something to estimate the value of the drug and then when they come back with study after study outside the ranges they gave, you lower their funding. E.g. This is supposed to work on someone who was stage 2 and stop progression and then 5 years later it only "works" for stage 1 patients.
Strange breakthrough ideas can't even exist in the current system structurally, so going this route is the only logical choice. Which begs the question, why aren't clinical trials a private venture already? Governments are burning billions of taxpayer dollars for either nothing or cynically to keep the boomers alive and voting even longer, while 1/5 children are obese. For the rest of us we've socialized the risk and privatized the profits.
Low intracellular ATP/GTP.
Alzheimer’s occurs when Amyloid/Tau debris accumulates faster than the glymphatic system can export it.
Parkinson’s occurs when α-synuclein (Lewy Bodies) accumulates because the cellular recycling system (Mitophagy) has failed.
While Choline is a critical bottleneck for Alzheimer's, Glutathione and GBA enzyme activity are the primary bottlenecks for Parkinson’s. But in both cases it depends on the person and their genetics and what matters the most. If someone is at high risk for Alzheimer's a multi-pronged approach will probably be very common. For example a post menopause woman who is not on HRT, but at high risk due to parents should be getting Choline due to the low PEMT expression, but they might have a higher risk for neuroinflammation via NLRP3 and so need to also combat that too.
To say no progress has been made is to ignore the fact that we have learned a ton about the various components of these systems and how they can break down.
Here are the two approximate decay equations that you can put into an online latex viewer.
Alzheimer's
\Psi_{AD} = \int_{0}^{t} \frac{[(\mathbf{K}_{\tau} \otimes \mathbf{K}_{A\beta}) \cdot \mathcal{I}_{NLR P 3}]}{[\mathcal{G}(Li \cdot GSK3\beta^{-1}) \cdot PRO(ER\alpha \cdot \text{PEMT}) ] \cdot \Omega_{ATP}} \cdot e^{\left( \frac{\Gamma_{\text{fibrosis}} \cdot \text{PAI-1}}{EPA \cdot \text{Natto}} \right)} \, dt
Parkinson's
\Psi_{PD} = \int_{0}^{t} \frac{[(\mathbf{K}_{\alpha\text{-syn}} \otimes \mathcal{I}_{LRRK2}) \cdot \mathcal{I}_{NLRP3}]}{[\mathcal{G}(\text{Parkin} \cdot \text{PINK1}) \cdot PRO(\text{Dopamine}_{\text{flux}})] \cdot \Omega_{ATP}} \cdot e^{\left(\frac{\Gamma_{\text{Oxidative}} \cdot \text{Iron}}{\text{Glutathione} \cdot \text{GBA}}\right)} \, dt
And for good measure here is cancer
\Psi_{Onco} = \int_{0}^{t} \frac{[ (\mathbf{M}_{mut} \otimes \mathcal{G}_{growth}) \cdot \mathcal{I}_{STAT3} ]}{ [ \mathcal{G}(p53 \cdot \text{PTEN}) \cdot PRO(\text{Anoikis}) ] \cdot \Omega_{ATP}} \cdot e^{\left( \frac{\Gamma_{hypoxia} \cdot \text{VEGF}}{\text{Repair}_{DNA} \cdot \text{Immune}_{flux}} \right)} \, dt
The point of these isn't to give an exact equation, but to make the understanding of the systems and their components radically simpler for humans to understand which can help with treatment leading to questions like "Where is the bottleneck in this patients system?”
The current findings seem consistent with "both plaques and tangles are significant components of the pathology" and "our interventions are typically late and the accumulated neurological damage is already extreme by the time clinical symptoms show".
Attacking the plaques wasn't completely worthless - findings show that this often slows disease progression, especially in early cases. There are pre-symptomatic trials ongoing that may clear the air on whether "intervention is late" is the main culprit in treatment underperformance.
I'm now about half way through. It's really good.
> Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself, and yeah, I know that sounds like the guy at the pet store packing a starved Komodo dragon into the carrier with your new dog, just to calm him down some.
I'm guessing he just ran out of nasty chemicals. Either that, or he got tired of it and followed his muse elsewhere.
Unfortunately that insight hasn't led closer to a cure.
It also turns out sort of bad to tell people they have a horrible neurodegenerative disease 10 years before the major symptoms start.
Why isn't everyone's mind blown? Well for the cynical explanation, look at the state of science education and what people said about Artemis, vaccines, etc. or optimistically, there are too many mind blowing discoveries to treat them all fairly.
can't mark-up snake oil, not in ways to shift the stock price for Fortune 100 tier companies -- too many lawsuits and visibility
The vaccine prevention connection for example AFAIK is just pure statistics: you get the shingles vaccine, your population level Alzheimer's risk drops but we have no direct evidence of why this should be.
Its entirely possible we later find it has no effect and it's a population level quirk of people who were likely to get a shingles vaccine until that research - conversely the cost of just getting one is incredibly low (hence why I did, in relation to that exact data).
Trials are currently ongoing. The results should start trickling out in a few years...
While there are counter examples and inefficiencies in the system (and there are idea of addressing this, by distributing some part of the money in other ways), we have far bigger societal issues because people do not believe in science, especially where there is an industry lobby sowing doubts.
So I really want to push back against the the idea that the scientific system is broken. While there are real issues, this is still very misleading.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10407-9
(I’m an author)
No it isn't, and not by a long shot. The vast majority of medical tourists to Cuba are from the Caribbean, virtually no one else goes there for medical care. If you have money to travel for healthcare there are tons of better options, and most countries with national systems have VASTY superior facilities.
> Despite being strangled by the longest running US embargo
The US embargo which I don't support doesn't cover medical or agricultural goods. The Cubans received free oil and equipment from the USSR then Venezuela, and still couldn't manage to maintain any infrastructure. They can trade with any companies that aren't US based, and do. Their largest trade partners are Spain, and for agricultural goods the US. However the country is so badly managed and corrupt that they've turned all of that free oil, industrial equipment, and expertise into abject failure.
> remarkable and free healthcare system.
It's actually dog shit, and their own government admits that its plagued by shortages[1][2]. I personally have known several people who go there to perform free eye surgeries and have to bring their own equipment because the Cuban system doesn't have any.
> Anyone that's worked in international crises is well aware of Cuba's army of doctor
The UN has called this slave labor[3] on several occasions, and many people I've talked to who have worked with MSF and otehr international medical aid orgs all say the Cuban doctors are so poorly trained as to be dangerous to patients. The lack of materials in Cuba means they never get hands on experience with vital techniques.
Get out of here with this Hassan Piker bullshit.
[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-14/we-are-d...
[2] https://cuba.miami.edu/business-economy/a-close-look-at-cuba...
[3]https://www.prisonersdefenders.org/2020/01/08/united-nations...
Fraud is everywhere and we still move forward in most arenas.
So if your cure is targeting something different but the group of people you have are selected from this cohort of maybe afflicted people then it's really hard to get a significant result. Plus you tend to be dealing with old people, that have other health issues that MCI isn't causing to get any better.
Meanwhile the Alz and Neuro field as a whole are well established, and the amyloid hypothesis was a foundational theory taken as a fact. Any initial questioning of this and they would brand you as a lunatic.
Tautology day is today because today is tautology day.
... not by "obviousness"
I can't check every stone for moss. We can't know every detail about anything.
Biggest example of this risk aversion is the peptide craze going on (the most famous of which are GLP-1 antagonists). It's pretty much a wild west where people read a low-sample animal study, and buy a drug that's "for research only, not for human consumption" off of a compounding pharmacy in China.
Few human studies because even if you have willing and enthusiastic volunteers it's too expensive and creates legal liability. And the FDA cannot approve it without a high bar of evidence (for effective treatment and low risk) and costly, time consuming reviews. Because of this, there is a black market for the things and people are basically being their own test subjects.
This may be true, but I don't think it's the major driver of conservatism. Two thoughts/observations:
1) Bodies like the FDA face a strongly skewed set of incentives. If they take a risk on something and people get hurt, they face huge public criticism. If they take a risk on something and it's all fine, very few people care or notice. As such, they are strongly driven to not make a public mistake - which drives ever more conservatism.
2) FDA can actually be innovative compared to other health authorities. Breakthrough therapy designation, Project Optimus, Project Frontrunner, and others - show this. However, they've got a strong 'not invented here' mindset - they flatly refuse well-meaning individual innovations from pharma companies, if they're not compatible with FDA's guidelines. And they're heavily bureaucratic, meaning the innovations that do appear are usually following years of process (which probably links back to #1).
There is no longer a binary approval/non-approval status. Drugs and treatments that address terminal conditions often get special status. Drugs for rare diseases definitely get special treatment.
In addition, many studies now use continual data collection and evaluation. If the results are very good or very bad, that can be recognized much more quickly and with fewer people exposed to risk than previous types of studies. Reaction to negative events doesn't happen in hours, but it isn't all that far from that.
As to the trials specifically for Lecanemab and Donanemab, the benefits are not claimed to be either strong or large, even by those who support it. The current support these receive is more aligned with the concept that an improved targeting of Aβ amyloid might improve outcomes. This remains to be demonstrated.
It doesn't ask whether amyloid is causative of the disease.
The hypothesis didn't come from nowhere.
To contrast, look at how much trouble medicine has had treating brain tumors. It has taken a long time to get effective treatments for various reasons. And Alzheimer's is way less direct in cause/effect.
Do you want think carefully about how this can possibly suggest this is a causal link?
> People with mutations that caused amyloid got Alzheimer's earlier than others.
People with mutations in those genes got a particular type of inherited alzheimers early, this says nothing about the cause of general Alzheimers.
This is completely analogous to claiming that people with mutations in BRCA (which causes a lot of early breast cancers) says nothing about general "cancer".
That's simply flat-out wrong. Genetic mutations like BRCA affect certain subsystems and many of those subsystems are common and relevant to many different cancers outside of breast cancer or breast cancers that appear later. Lots and lots of cancer research proceeded by studying the common systems that BRCA affects. Sure, those subsystems aren't involved in every cancer, but they're involved in a solid chunk of them.
And, even better, when you find one that isn't affected by one of those subsystems that BRCA touches, that's an interesting result, too. Now you can look at what the differences are, figure out what the new subsystems are and categorize your cancer more specifically which makes successful treatment more likely.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Alzheimer's is any different on that front.
And it's also not a good idea to suppose that you are dealing with unrelated effects without good reason. Mutations->more amyloid->earlier symptoms should be considered indicative of the disease pathway until sufficient evidence counteracts that, by Occam's razor.
I mean an amyloid injection is wildly unethical and it’s also not the natural progression of Alzheimer’s. Removing amyloid is a simple matter of investing billions of dollars into drug development. Also how do you tell whether that was actually “causal” if the patients improve after plaque removal.
I mean come on, you have to work the evidence and the experimental tools that we actually have. This kind of epistemic puritanism doesn’t help anyone.
Erm, we kinda did? People who got cadaver-derived human growth hormone from Alzheimer's patients got Alzheimer's.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02729-2
And we just had an actual autopsy confirm a case: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/new-evidence-strengthen...
That sort of question is what the response from user @bsder above helpfully tries to answer. That mode would invite more productive discussion, not more defensive annoyance.
Rules on HN say “Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.” but it is hard.
All I can suggest is: be patient and try to be positive
An example of “good” pharma would be Hepatitis C. We can now cure that. Although, pharma is charging the lifetime equivalent in order to do that (a treatment can run over $100k and insurance balks at covering it)
So pharma will absolutely develop a cure if they can. They however will still charge you as if you had to take a dose for the rest of your life.
Not really. Note that it's not taking ozempic for life vs taking nothing for life, but actually taking ozempic for life vs taking ozempic and 5 different medications for life when obesity related illnesses bite you in the ass. So generally ozempic still is "good" pharma (and the plot twist is that almost every pharma is good pharma!).
Well yes, Ozempic doesn't solve the habits of a bad diet.
The weight rebound is surely due in little part to removal of hunger suppression as in "hormone rebound", but if you resume eating 5000+ kcal/day because you don't have something that keeps you from doing it, you'll end up in the same situation as before. Ozempic was never meant and is not going to fix your diet. That's a psychological and environmental problem.
> From the human perspective, researchers are people, and they do have their incentives. Making a breakthrough, of any kind, is important for them - even if for their career (but many do genuinely care and want to help humanity as a whole).
Researchers are people, but they are paid and directed. They can't go off and do what they like. The corporation directs them, and they are paid for their efforts. Researchers (and all working people) aren't doing what is right - they are doing what they are paid to do.
All the financial upside for pharmaceuticals is in prolonged treatments. It is a 'long sickness' industry. This is perhaps too bitter a pill to swallow for most, so this is where marketing and education come in with the sugar.
For cancer in particular, pharmas don't (and mostly can't) just target a drug to chronically treat some cancer over the long term but not cure it. Instead they pick some target that's believed to contribute to development (/ metastasis / treatment resistance / whatever) in whatever cancer, and make a drug to interfere with it or to target an immune response to cells that make it. If it's stable, nontoxic, and looks potentially effective enough they'll take it to clinical trials. During clinical trials they'll find out whether it does nothing, gives you a few extra months, or has a chance at curing the disease. Usually the answer is that it does nothing or almost nothing, or isn't worth the side effects, and then the company wasted its time and money. Drugs with a chance to cure common types of cancer can be enormous successes -- see eg Herceptin.
Cancers are difficult diseases and it's rare to find something that reliably cures them. But drug companies aren't pulling their punches. Like they would never say "oh this drug clears breast cancer too reliably, we should make it less effective so that people will be more likely to die but also might take it for longer".
Chicken pox, polio, hepatitis C, dracunculiasis, yaws, malaria (on the way of it), tuberculosis, syphilis, everything that can be killed with antibiotics, rubella...
Halcyon days.
And cancer isn't one disease. It is hundreds. Many of which have cures.
Diabetes was much harder to understand (and also isn't a single disease). Recent results have demonstrated islet cell transplants in type 1 that don't require life-long immune suppression. That isn't wide-spread yet but it is promising.
An interesting example of an actual cure is ulcers. Most humans who gets ulcers get them because of bacterial infection with H. Pilori. Killing that infection cures the ulcers. That didn't used to be possible because the cause wasn't understood.
Improving standard of care for 100 is less risky/more profitable because you have more shots at an expensive process with a high failure rate. And it is a lower bar to improve patient care than to permanently fix a medical mystery. But there is another factor. Focusing on treatment/management over cure most likely maximizes the positive impact on patients within the the constraints you work under.
There have been at least three new major treatments for a chronic thing I have that received FDA approval over my lifetime. Those treatments have had a massive impact on my quality of life, ability to have a career, etc. I don't believe that happens for me if we allocate to cures.
The point I am making is that you are a/ not getting cured, and b/ paying a lot of money. The reason for this, is this is best strategy for maximising profits. Its really the exact same model as your local heroin/crack dealer.
Please set me straight if those conditions differ in your case.
Profits are what pharma companies want.
The consumer is mostly labouring under the illusion that companies want the best for you. They are not your mum. They want what's best for them. And, most people would do the same - no one is gifting anyone health.
All I'm saying is let's drop the illusions and fantasy and call a spade a spade.
Type I diabetes - no, but this is a condition in which the body attacks the part of itself that makes insulin. So by the time it happens, it's too late. Sadly, we're generally bad at understanding and preventing autoimmune diseases, but this needs more basic research, not drugs.
Type II diabetes - essentially a lifestyle condition. May be functionally cured in some/many cases with strict lifestyle interventions. Ironically, GLP-1s may help move some people towards a functional cure.
Cancer - yes, where possible. The open secret is that the best way to fight cancer is to not get it in the first place, or failing that to catch it very early, but these are issues of lifestyle and public health policy - both of which we're currently very bad at optimising, as a species.
> All the financial upside for pharmaceuticals is in prolonged treatments.
Except for the examples to the contrary.
Why would any competitor sit on a cure for a condition there opponents can only treat when in the short term you'd post amazing next quarter profits, and in the long term you'd financially diminish that competitor in the market place even if we grant the position that you are somehow able to find treatments that aren't cures (others have explained ably why this isn't how it works).
Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't understand anything.
It's possible, of course, that some methods of targeting amyloid might work where others failed. But even those that claim success (Donanemab and Lecanemab) have a very modest benefit.
And since these were developed using different methods and epitopes, it does not make sense to pool them together when doing a comparison. It's obvious that if you combine modestly beneficial compounds and compounds with zero beneficial effect then the mean effect will be worse than the modestly beneficial compounds.
And when you do so just because they were aimed at the same molecular target, not even considering if anyone claims that the old, unapproved antibody-therapies, with no positive studies to support them, have any effect, what you are doing is somewhere between extreme ignorance and deception.
Correlation not causation is all the more important in a topic like this; nothing you said suggests amyloid causes alzheimers or just forms because of it.
I, also a non-expert, spent six months studying what the experts are doing, concluded that they actually seem to know what they’re talking about, and shared my understanding of that with other non-experts.
If you’re going to dismiss me for saying the experts are right, since I’m not an expert, then shouldn’t you dismiss those who spent far less time than I to learn about the subject, who are saying the experts are wrong?
Already have
The people who know the most are probably busy and (not to be rude) are not necessarily the strongest educators.
Maybe my standard is too low here or I have a different need than you, would make a different accuracy-accessibility tradeoff…
wrt. original post - quickly googled, and that for example https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-are-Amyloid-Plaques... - pretty short and seems to be clear that amyloids do have some correlation while may or may be not the cause.
"Amyloid plaques form one of the two defining features of Alzheimer’s disease, the other being neurofibrillary tangles"
Interesting that the latter is inside the neurons while the former is outside - speaking of complexity. The article also describes that activating microglia back helps with amyloid plaques while this
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33010092/#:~:text=The%20stud...
"The neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and amyloid-ß plaques (AP) that comprise Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuropathology are associated with neurodegeneration and microglial activation. "
Human body reminds a large monolith codebase - fixing one thing breaks some other :). Claude Code, Human Body CRISPR edition, can't come soon enough...
Is that supposed to be an endorsement or a dismissal? The ostensible goals of "rationality" seem like good things, so it sounds like an endorsement, but in the wake of the FTX/SBF fallout they got a bad rap.
It’s a miracle it works at all
Again, if your choice is improving quality of care for 100 conditions or trying to moonshot your way to curing one disease, more patients benefit from the former even if pharma also profits more.
see also: right wing grift
Alzheimer is a lot more difficult to measure than weight and amyloid-beta in the brain obviously significantly harder to target than the GLP-1 receptor in the body.
Also, a review pooling together all GLP-1's (including those that failed in development) and concluding that they as a class have only moderate or weak effect on weight loss, would obviously be badly misleading.
The point about the anti-amyloid trials is that they all succeeded in removing amyloid. But they did not improve cognition, and only some resulted in a slightly slower rate of decline in cognition (people still declined).
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39841962/
>Forty-seven RCTs were included, with a combined cohort of 23,244 patients. GLP-1 RAs demonstrated a mean weight reduction of -4.57 kg (95% CI -5.35 to -3.78), mean BMI reduction of -2.07 kg/m2 (95% CI -2.53 to -1.62), and mean waist circumference reduction of -4.55 cm (95% CI -5.72 to -3.38) compared with placebo.
Your meta review has like 80%-90% of the studies on semaglutide and liraglutide. When finding random effect per drug, they even say this:
> Hence, the drugs eligible for meta-regression were semaglutide (subcutaneous injection, once weekly) and liraglutide (subcutaneous injection, once daily), which both showed a dose-dependent treatment effect in terms of weight and BMI.
And the class-effect is much more modest than semaglutide by itself would have shown, exactly as I said. What is the point?
For the GLP-1 strategy, Table 1 in the above paper shows that all drugs were clearly effective. Some were better than others.
For the amyloid strategy, only some of the drugs were effective, and that efficacy was very weak, even when all the drugs removed amyloid. This brings into question the hypothesis that removing amyloid would alleviate AD, i.e. the slender benefits of Lecanemab might not be caused by amyloid removal. The same cannot be said for the GLP-1 receptor agonists.
I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. There's no mystery here, it's basic physics and chemistry that this will change things, and it's accepted that we don't know exactly _how_ things will change. The alternative: "adding gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere will _not_ change anything" is simply non-sensical. It goes against the basic rules of physics and causality. I'm happy to be proved wrong here, I just legitimately can't see how an alternative position makes any sense.
Edit: I see you specifically pointed out "predictions of catastrophe", which if that is true (and not just the position of radicals on Twitter) is indeed unfortunate.
However research into what we humans can do to ameliorate it is verboten. For example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... was an actual experiment that found a low cost way to both remove lots of CO2, and improve a fishery. But that line of research has been shut down.
Likewise research into the current impact is only allowed if it agrees with what is politically correct. For example many researchers have found that current severe California forest fires are mostly due to poor past policies, that have resulted in very dense forest, with a large fuel overload. But research that stresses the impact of climate change are easier to publish, and this shifts the apparent consensus on the causes of things like the major 2025 fires in the Los Angeles area.
> Not geoengineering
> The project is also unlikely to bury much if any carbon dioxide for one simple reason: metabolism. As other iron fertilization experiments have shown, it is relatively easy to get plankton to bloom, but it is harder for that bloom to sink to the bottom of the ocean, where it takes CO2 with it.
This project is a net carbon emitter by design.
With any position, you have to distinguish between its thoughtful advocates and its thoughtless ones-every position has both
Any thoughtful “climate change sceptic” is going to say (a) of course the climate is changing-it always has and always will; (b) of course it is implausible than human activity has literally zero impact on that change. But that still doesn’t tell us: (i) the relative scale of anthropogenic versus natural causal factors; (ii) the validity of any specific predictions of future change; (iii) the likely socioeconomic impacts of any future changes that may occur. It is totally possible that a person may affirm (a) and (b) while questioning the “consensus” on (i) and (ii) and (iii)
Personally, I don’t have a strong opinion on the substantive issue - but I wonder about the extent to which mainstream discourse on the topic represents good epistemic hygiene. It is even possible that the sceptics are on the whole more wrong than right, but simultaneously the mainstream response to them is more irrational than rational.
Question a clickbait "we're all gonna die" prediction, and you are immediately branded as a "denier", and no further discourse is possible.
Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example.
There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.
Absolutely, the issues are similar
And if this can upend the business model of some big companies we'll give some "incentives" to some "doubtful" scientists even if their doubts are unfounded (actually very well founded but you get the gist)
Which sucks because such work should be free of pressures and incentives
Depends! If you're a large fossil fuel company, the obvious move might be to spend more money on advertising agencies scientists, or entire foundations who question climate science instead.
... which they did. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7
Meanwhile, the basics were known since the 19th century. https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf
There is a yawning abyss of states in between extinction and 'boy sure is a few degrees warmer out here' and none of them are good.
Many organisms would benefit from a warmer climate, just not humans.
We rely on extremely narrow conditions for the fragile supply chains and power structures that keep us on the ragged edge of civilized to continue working. We had an extremely mild contagious disease outbreak, by historic standards, and our economy is still feeling the effects!
Imagine the impacts of something like wildly different rainfall patterns, increased rate of global infectious disease, shifted agricultural zones, changes to Jetstream patterns, large scale crop failures, loss of water supplies, temporary local ecosystem collapses etc. These changes are incredibly fast on the scale of what it takes to reach ecological equilibrium.
These of course mean nothing to biological life, writ large. Life will recover and adapt. To fragile human civilization they mean refugee crisis, resource wars, failed infrastructure, and ten thousand other existentially terrible things.
You didn't ask, but my opinion on it is that we'll probably stabilize on a cleaner energy source and find natural countermeasures when suffering ticks up. Any top down pressure to change things whole cloth seems doomed, no matter how benevolent. We're closed loop creatures.
What better way to find out than to just try it and see if we end up with runaway warming? That surely can't cause any harm.
For Climate Change it's a question of opportunity costs. With expected inputs how much will temperature change? What are the effects of that change? How much effort to you put into changing the inputs? How much effort do you put into dealing with the effects?
The biggest difference is that Climate Change is a deeply political question with a bit of science tossed in. Alzheimer's is the mirror opposite - it's a scientific question with politics added to the same degree of most other things.
I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise.
I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trc...
The financial motivation for fraud is all on the side of climate-change denial. Literally trillions of dollars of motivation.
Climate-change denial is just like tobacco-cancer denial. It's the same banal "I win, you all lose" mechanism. Enormous resources are available (along with the useful idiots) to propagate falsehoods.
Nonsense. It is actually quite unlike climate science, where the consensus of catastrophe and the evidence for it are both overwhelming. Dissenters are listened to only to the extent they can provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which they so far cannot.
The idea that they have blocked the treatment of Alzheimer's rather than helping it, is very, very painful. This is perfect for creating cognitive dissonance.
And so, no matter what the evidence, they remain committed to the conclusion.
As a result, the latest Alzheimer's drug to enter stage 3 FDA trials is Trontinemab. (It is currently in stage 3.) It targets the amyloid target.
A relative drop in the bucket is going to, say, the infection hypothesis. This despite the fact that the only intervention that has been shown to reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's, is the shingles vaccine.
“When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that.”
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/after_climate_research_phy...
If you haven’t read up on both, it’s hard to appreciate how unlike climate science is from the beta amyloid theory. The latter has some evidence but there were always alternate theories by serious researchers because it involved multiple systems which scientists were still working to understand and basic questions around causation and correlation had significant debate.
In contrast, climate scientists reached consensus about climate change four decades ago and by now have established many separate lines of evidence which all support what has been the consensus position. More importantly, since the 1970s they have been making predictions which were subsequently upheld by measured data from multiple sources. The ongoing research is in fine-tuning predictions, estimating efficacy of proposed interventions, etc. but nobody is seriously questioning the basic idea.
Almost all of the people you hear dismissing climate change are funded by a handful of companies like Exxon, whose own internal research showing climate change was a significant threat produced a chart in 1982 which has proven accurate:
https://skepticalscience.com/pics/Exxonpredictions.png
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16092015/exxons-own-resea...
The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
If anything the current consensus on the scientific front lines is that the alarmism is understated, and the real orthodoxy is astroturfed denial of the facts.
The global fossil industry is worth around $11 trillion a year. It supports some of the worst regimes in the world.
Of course they're going to try to FUD away the science, with the usual copy-paste narratives about how it's really scientists and academics who are corrupt.
It's all about money, power, and entitlement. Not about truth or responsibility.
But no amount of PR nonsense, astroturfing, and false accusation is going to make the slightest difference to climate reality.
The idea being both to make it easy to get people to agree today (the reductions are tomorrow's problem), and to allow time (and foresight) for industry to adapt to where things are going.
and a whole fuckin lot that wouldn't, and that may collapse the ecosystem
Couldn't disagree more.
Please spend it on those who might actually fix something. There's plenty of can remove carbon or can undo the effect of X on Y. Let's stop falling back on the bad argument of we must leave nature alone right after arguing we change billion dollar industries because we can.
We shouldn't learn to be custodians watching the planet die because of past mistakes, we should be fixing and improving the planet and improving on nature because we can, must and should, shoulder this reaponsibility.
Please not _yet more modelling_ burning HPC into the ground just for a crappy bar line graph (based on assumptions)...
How do you do this without a process of finding out what works and what doesn't? Isn't that science? Or am I misunderstanding you saying no more modeling to mean we already know everything we might need to know in order to shoulder this planet scale responsibility and just collectively aren't doing anything except making bar charts?
What does your proposal actually look like without science or climate modeling?
The worst case scenario laid out in that article is that most of the carbon absorbed, was later rereleased. So net zero carbon, not net carbon emitter.
I've seen other reports of that exact experiment that estimated a significant net carbon sink. The actual experiment failed to make measurements that lets us know which actually happened.
Regardless, we've certainly demonstrated that, at least sometimes, there is significant net carbon capture, at low cost. Given the certainty of global damage at present, I believe that this justifies continued experimentation. Even if it means accepting possible risk to local ecosystems. The local ecosystem can generally recover. The planet, not so much.
...and it really did backfire (in public relations, politics, etc)
now... I don't think they can actually fund 'research-for-their-profit' -- I mean, would you believe "petro is good for earth" research coming from oil companies, even after the 'lead is good or neutral' research?
Not uncritically, but if the research presents a logically consistent hypothesis, and evidence supporting it, then it would be worth following up on with independent groups and if it remains consistent to scrutiny then it should be accepted.
That's how science works.
