50 Years of Conventional Wisdom, Huh?

After almost a century of certainty that Amyloid Plaques cause Alzheimer's Disease, a new study shows that it is a lack of proteins, and not plaques, that cause the condition.

The general public did not start seeing these studies, and they tended not appear in the more prestigious journals until the drug Aduhelm crashed and burned in clinical tests, but was approved anyway. (At exorbitant cost)

Perhaps the outrage generated by this regulatory malpractice might have sent research in a new direction:

Contrary to a prevailing theory that has been recently called into question, new research from the University of Cincinnati (UC) bolsters a hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by a decline in levels of a specific protein.

UC researchers led by Alberto Espay, MD, and Andrea Sturchio, MD, in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, published the research on October 4, 2022, in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

………

This research study was focused on a protein called amyloid-beta. The protein normally carries out its functions in the brain in a form that is soluble, meaning that it is dissolvable in water. However, it sometimes hardens into clumps, known as amyloid plaques.

For more than 100 years, the conventional wisdom in the field of Alzheimer’s research stated that Alzheimer’s was caused by the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain. However, Espay and his colleagues hypothesized that plaques are actually just a consequence of the levels of soluble amyloid-beta in the brain decreasing. These levels decrease because the normal protein, under situations of biological, metabolic, or infectious stress, transforms into the abnormal amyloid plaques.

“The paradox is that so many of us accrue plaques in our brains as we age, and yet so few of us with plaques go on to develop dementia,” said Espay. He is a a UC Health physician, a professor of neurology in the UC College of Medicine, and director and endowed chair of the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Family Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders at the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute. “Yet the plaques remain the center of our attention as it relates to biomarker development and therapeutic strategies.”

It should be noted that this sort of error, if it is actually an error, is not as uncommon as one would thing.  

For example, the number of chromosomes in a human cell was thought to be 48 for decades until advances in technology, particularly the use of colchicine, allowed for a definitive number, 46.

I think that one of the differences these days is the extraordinary, and excessive, profits in such treatments, which gives researchers a vested interest in not presenting heterodox theories.

Aduhelm cost $56,000.00 a year for treatment, and a new drug, mentioned in the study, lecanemab, has  a similar extortionate price, which means that the incentives to prostitute science for profit remain.