In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
On the one hand, I really really want it to be a world-changing breakthrough for real this time. I’ve been losing my dad to Alzheimer’s for several years now and even if it’s too late for him I would just hope that nobody else has to go through that in the future. On the other hand, knowing that it’s someone’s business model to jerk at my hope and heart-strings for ad engagement has me more or less ready to fire futurism into the fucking sun
Right so Alzheimer’s results in the death of neurons.
Humans cannot regrow neurons. Most animals cannot.
The few exceptions are in one small area of the brains limbic system.
Again. Not supported to happen in humans. But some theories say it might.
Even so. There is no drug that can restore neurons lost.
No drug that can restore the connections between neurons that are lost.
There already were drugs discovered 20 years ago that cure rats of AD related plaques and tau proteins. Doesn’t work in humans . Probably because those rats are genetically engineered to produce plaques and tau proteins.
Not the same as a human disease model.
There is no drug that can restore neurons lost.
Might be a stupid question, but could stem cells do that?
You should really look up human brain organoids, how they are created, and what we are doing with them. You can rent one and make it…do…think things. Sometimes they grow eyes.
The most recent Radiolab episode was on exactly that topic.
Not until after the orange man is gone. Please.
Where is that comic about reporters creating misinformed headlines about science?
Odds are it is at least somewhat bullshit, oversold, to garner more funding.
An unforgettable moment for those mice
Underrated comment.
In a mouse model. The mice don’t have alzheimers they have… something we gave them that looks like it… Hopefully it is similar enough
We… we gave… Alzheimer’s to mice…?
Are we the baddies?
We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we’ll save test tubes from cancer…again.
I feel like if the average person had any remote idea just how gloriously, horrifyingly complicated the human body is, we would be simultaneously far more skeptical of press releases, and far, far more invested in the actual science going on to figure out how to keep the whole cathedral from collapsing.
If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.
There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.
I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”
Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.
So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.
Dude it’s worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So…jaded.
Do tell
This is why almost everyone does development, not research.
There has been a fucking epidemic of MD/scientists running to the media with miracle cures lately.
Mice do not get Alzheimers, they were engineered to show one aspect of the disease that has been promoted by fraudulent studies. As for the reversal, mouse brains are highly plastic and similar to a human baby, nothing like a >60 year old.
HAH HEY EVERYONE THIS GUY THINKS MICE HAVE BRAINS MADE OF PLASTIC /s
Well I hear we are adding more plastic to the brain through micro dosing micro plastics in our every day lives. Wait…
Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing but apparently only in 5xFAD mice. I wish they would have also tried it in a Tau model like PS19.
Both pointless. Mice do not get neuronal loss like human disease. These diseases have been stalled for 30 years on animal models generating “high impact” manuscripts that go nowhere.
Meanwhile, in human research, just taking vaccines can lower AD incidence by 30%. For real, proven. Not “soon”, not “within 5 years” . That is far mor relevant than animal model studies.
If you’re talking about the infectious brain hypothesis, I agree. I’m submitting a manuscript on this topic right now. I wouldn’t say that all mouse studies are pointless though. People just tend to design and/or interpret them poorly due to ignoring limitations. Mouse and human physiology are in fact more dissimilar than the majority of researchers seem to acknowledge.
Oh, yeah? How come they still cant tell us how fucking magnets work?
Eat shit, “science.”
Mouse grandpa: John?
Mouse Grandson: Grampa, you remember me?
Mouse grandpa: Yes, I remember. It’s all coming back now. You ate my cheese and fucked my wife you piece of shit!
Sounds of mouse battle reverberating
Ew.
I believe this population of super-mice we are making that are immune to all disease will be the dominant life form on earth after we have extincted ourselves. Im in favor of this future.
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They will do our bidding in forever thanks to us.
Scientific advancements often seem like the only good news we ever seem to get.
Any drug would cost 20 million a course. Not even exagerating there either. A new one is doing dynamic pricing, charging some as much as 3 million and others over 1 million for a course. For drugs developed with goddamned charity money.
Don’t worry, they’ll get monetized to hell.
While often true, they still end up making life better for millions of people often enough to be worth it.
it’s lab mice. it’s NAD+. i can’t remember because i’m not an ad researcher, but there are 3 models of AD. one is NAD+, two aren’t. Most of the research was going into NAD+ or another, and they discovered that that specific model was not going to help human patients. It did nothing to effect research or funding. that was about… 15 years ago? so forgive me if i don’t get up.
Now we work towards changing elderly people into mice to cure their Alzheimer’s!
Let’s see if it works for Charlie now.
Aahh, those lucky mice. Yet another cure for Alzheimer, without counting the multiple cancer miracle-like cures.
Any news for human yet?
