New Alzheimer's drug: Hope or Hype?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

It was news many people have been desperately hoping for — a new drug to slow the progression of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

The recent announcement from the company Biogen Inc. quickly spread across social media. The company’s stock price surged.

The intense interest in the announcement is underscored by the number of people affected by the disease.

-snip-

But as with any announcement regarding a new medication, the question is, how much of the interest in what is being characterized as a potentially important new Alzheimer’s drug is hope versus hype?

https://www.heraldnet.com/life/new-alzheimers-drug-hope-or-hype/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=dbea63379c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-dbea63379c-228635337

[question everything]

1. How Biogen's Discontinued Alzheimer's Drug Got A Second Life

(snip)

She and a team of statisticians and programmers pooled all the data from the hundreds of study sites and thousands of patients, and combed through it. And when they finally looked at the overall results, they were surprised to find that one of the studies showed a clearly positive trend in reducing cognitive decline, while the other did not show much change in cognitive functions at all. The two studies were identical in terms of the types of patients enrolled and how they were randomly assigned to receive aducanumab or placebo. The only distinction was that one study began earlier than the other.


That made a difference, Haeberlein, believes, since Biogen changed certain aspects of the study design after patients began enrolling. For one, the very first people to volunteer were given much lower doses of the drug if they had the ApoE gene, a mutation that raises a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s—and also seemed to raise the risk of experiencing brain inflammation as a side effect of aducanumab. About two-thirds of the people who participated in the studies carried this high risk gene.

New data that became available after these patients began receiving their infusions, however, revealed that slightly higher doses were still safe and did not result in a marked increase in side effects. So these patients were then given higher doses. But many had either not yet or just begun their new doses when the company analyzed its data on the first half of patients last spring.

Other data supported the positive effect aducanumab was having on the patients. As part of the study, all of the volunteers periodically had brain scans taken to measure changes in the amount of amyloid buildup. They also had their cerebrospinal fluid tested for signs of the protein—as more amyloid starts to clump together in the brain, levels of the protein circulating in the spinal fluid tend to drop. These tests from the all of the study participants indicated that the people getting the highest doses of aducanumab were indeed also showing declines in amyloid plaques and steady levels of the protein in their spinal fluid. “Patients can’t influence the proteins in their brain,” says Haeberlein. “These wonderful readouts gave us further confidence that what we were looking at was very strong.”

https://time.com/5709023/biogen-alzheimers-drug/

[Cartaphelius]

3. Monetized use of untested chemicals

to further the pharmaceutical's "investors" R.O.I.

Test. But verify. To resolve a problem, it should be a
one and done, not an opps, we screwed up.

Thalidomide didn't teach us anything other than how
to profit while still killing lab rats.

I mean people.

[Cartaphelius]

2. HYPE

Listened to NPR yesterday and heard more promising results
from light therapy treatment possibly reversing memory
loss, without the use of chemicals that haven't undergone long
term testing establishing credible results.

No joke.

[MineralMan]

4. It's hard to say, really.

What's not hard to understand, though, is that Alzheimer's Disease is one of the most feared diseases there is for people in their 60s and beyond. Most of us have encountered it in our parents or others and the effect is truly devastating. So, millions of people are looking for hope in fighting its onset or for hope for an effective treatment.

That's going to be very tempting to pharmaceutical companies, especially those developing biologic medications. It's already spawned a huge number of over-the-counter products which neatly skirt around the limitations that can be used in advertise them. In this very thread is a post about the use of light to treat or avoid Alzheimer's. Someone is selling lights, apparently.

So, we're going to see lots of "promising" studies of "breakthrough" drugs that might, maybe, offer some hope. Of course, the pharmaceutical companies "hope" people will buy their stock and that they'll get a "promising" rise in its value.

Somewhere down the road, it's likely that there will be a drug that will help prevent or lessen the impact of Alzheimer's. In the meantime, though, there will be lots and lots of hype and some quackery designed to take advantage of people's fear of such a terrible end-of-life disease. I have a 95-year-old mother and a 73 year-old sister with Alzheimer's. I certainly wish there was something that could help them. Sadly, there isn't yet, and may not be in what's left of their lifetimes.

Meanwhile, my father still insists that Prevagen might help my mother. It won't, but he can afford it, so he buys it and "hopes" it will do some good.