[ExI] good bexarotene article

[spike]

>... Brian Manning Delaney
Subject: Re: [ExI] good bexarotene article

El 2012-02-11 15:59, Isabelle Hakala escribió:
>>... How difficult would it be to find someone with Alzheimer AND the
particular type of cancer that it is used for... Isabelle


>...Excellent idea!

>...A twist on your question: might it be possible to find enough people who
/already have/ taken the drug to look for a meaningful reduction in rate of
Alzheimer's compared to matched controls? The matching would be tricky of
course: look at age-, sex-, etc.-matched controls who also had skin cancer?
Then the sample is tiny. Or forget the cancer in the matching, under the
assumption it's not significantly related to the dev. of Alzheimer's?
(Though there probably is an indirect relation via cancer's impact on
exercise levels and diet, which also affect risk of
Alzheimer's.) Either way, there's got to be some useful data already out
there, seems to me. The drug has been in use for nearly 13 years. The number
of people who've taken it might be many thousands. Let's take a look at
them!

-Brian
_______________________________________________

Good ideas from Brian, thanks.

Do we have any hipsters here who are medics or have friends who are, who are
hip to how one gets at this kind of data?  Seems like there is a masters
degree offered in some places called Public Health, that deals with this
sort of thing, ja?  If this isn't already a specialized field of study, it
should be.  Otherwise we would need to create it.  How?

spike