[ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

[spike]

On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki
Subject: Re: [ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

Any work done in amyloid mice is likely to be useless - the models are wrong
on many levels, from the fact that they are using mutated proteins (which
are almost always absent in senile dementia), to using combinations of
mutated proteins (which almost never happens in senile dementia), to the
lack of pathology in response to the mutated proteins (which indicates the
mouse's brain reacts differently on the biochemical level than human brain).
These mice have essentially no construct validity for senile dementia,
misleadingly called "Alzheimer's disease", and only poor to middling
construct validity for the true Alzheimer's dementia which is a very
uncommon familial disease affecting young and middle age adults.

Save your money, until you see results in aged dogs or monkeys (not
mutated). If somebody publishes a non-human primate study showing a good
cognitive boost in 25 year old rhesus monkeys, I would be very impressed.

Rafal
_______________________________________________


Thanks Rafal, I came to the same conclusion with great regret.  It has been
a week since the news hit.  I have been scouring the internet almost
constantly to see if anyone had taken some of this stuff, and if so what
happened.  The silence on the topic was deafening.  So I had to conclude
that of the estimated perhaps a thousand people who managed to get Targretin
in the past week, none saw any positive results.  Otherwise they would have
posted it in the usual places, and I would have found them by now.  It
surprises me that no one took some and imagined positive results, but I
can't find even that.  I sometimes think imagined positive results are how
we ended up with the apparently useless Aricept and the possibly worse than
nothing Namenda.  But how the hell can we know for sure?  It is maddening
difficult to tell if these medications work.

spike