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    • CommentAuthorCharlotte
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2017
     
    This article was posted by 'Alzheimer Disease Cooperative Study'

    It was not very encouraging for the future of Alzheimer's disease. Says it could be a couple more generations before they find anything that works.

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-would-it-take-to-get-an-effective-alzheimers-drug/?wt.mc=SA_Facebook-Share
    • CommentAuthorbhv*
    • CommentTimeJul 20th 2017
     
    Finally got around to reading this. Yes, it will take a long time, but this is a good explanation of why that is true. In some ways it is encouraging for future.generations because.they have learned so very much since the late 1970s when I was in school.

    I find myself wishing for some caregiver drugs. Like something to make us believe that shit doesn't stink. Something to make us believe that it really is the first time we heard.the question. Something to blunt the angry.emotional responses, without blunting the happy ones.
    • CommentAuthorCharlotte
    • CommentTimeJul 20th 2017 edited
     
    I was listening to RFK Jr the other day. His pet peeve is the fact they don't test vaccines in combinations. He say drugs for cancer and all other illnesses have to go through years of rigorous testing. Yet, when a company comes up with a vaccine they do a little study then start hitting people with it. And, they never test what happens to the body when you combine them. I still in the belief that vaccines are responsible for the increase in Autism (besides it becoming the catch all like ADHD and fibromyalgia). By age 18 the average child has 69 vaccines, many of those in combinations.

    I know they have put a 'fast track' on AD drugs, but as we all know they have all failed in preliminary studies. I think if they offered it many already with AD would volunteer to try them. Remember a couple years ago when one of the cancer drugs was found to help clear the brain of plaque? Don't hear any more on it.
    • CommentAuthorRSA*
    • CommentTimeJul 20th 2017
     
    bhv, I wish I could recall older, happy memories without feeling it's pretend, make believe. For me, it's painful to see the contrast between my wife as she was and my wife as she is now. The present is painful, the past is impossible, and the future...

    Charlotte, I haven't heard RFK Jr. talk about testing vaccines in combination, I'll put on my professor hat for a moment: RFK Jr. may not have a good grasp of combinatorics, a relatively specialized area of mathematics. Let's assume that a drug X for a given condition goes through a year of testing before it goes on the market (a very optimistic amount of time). What if five other drugs are also plausible for the same condition, perhaps in combination? Instead of one year of testing of drug X, we have that one year, plus five more years of testing in combination with each of the other drugs. There are thousands of drugs that are given in combination with each other, and we simply don't have the resources to test all combinations. Instead of the cost of one year of testing, it would be that same cost multiplied by the thousands of other possible two-way drug combinations. Unfortunately, we don't have the biological or medical knowledge, in many cases, to know how a given drug works and whether it will interact well or badly with others, without testing.
    • CommentAuthorCharlotte
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2017
     
    His big point I think and agree, when a vaccine is made by a drug company it does not go through the same rigorous testing that normal drugs do. And combining so many together, each one basically giving the child a mild case of the disease to build up immunity, what does it do to the child fighting all these diseases at once? Their body never has amply time to recover before they are given more vaccines. Back in the 70s I was bitten by a neighbors dog. I went to the ER where they preceded to give me a tetanus shot - first one I ever had. They said since I never had one before I would need two more which I never got. My arm was hot and swollen for over a week. The pain was worse than the dog bite. I have only had two in my lifetime - the polio when in 6th grade my mother consented to and smallpox which I needed when I went back and lived with my sister in Maine my freshman year. At the time Maine required it. When I went back to the doctor he was shocked I barely had a reaction. He said I should have three 'smallpox' at the sight. Evidently I had good immunity!

    I am not against vaccines, but I am against them giving so many. 69 by age 18, something like 40 by age 6.
    • CommentAuthorWolf
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2017
     
    I think these are important points for society to learn more about. As RSA said, we don't do combination testing the way we should. It isn't just the other drugs we likely are also taking, it's can be the diet we eat. An example of this is Lipitor which reacts badly with grapefruit.

    I had no idea so many vaccines are used these days so I can't comment on that. I believe I had one for polio and one for measles when I was young, and then I had a measles vaccine about twenty years ago.

    Unfortunately there is a lot of money to be made with these things and the heads of the drug companies and the executives of the FDA are interchangeable - they hire each other which is incestuous. Despite the shortcomings, there aren't that many drugs that are later pulled such as for example VIoxx was after causing a documented 27,000 heart attacks.

    In my own experience early on Dianne was put on three drugs, Aricept, Lipitor, and an anti depressant. After a few months she started fainting and there wasn't a scrap of information about how those three might be interfering with each other. I stopped all of them without telling anyone and that was never an issue raised with the geriatric specialist, the GP, or the agencies I worked with. The nursing home had a drug lite policy compared to the most popular nursing home which had a five year waiting list. There it was clear that everyone was in a stupor.

    My friend recently mentioned that at age 65, the annual checkups become semi annual. I told my sister this where neither of us has seen a doctor in over ten years, neither of us is on any medication of any kind, and neither of us has been sick. That's not going to last, but then neither am I. I think it's as healthy to not worry too much about that as it is to live close to a good hospital.

    In my opinion, it's nearly certain that an effective solution against AD can be found. It's a protein that begins building up plaque that gums the works. Something in the human genome makeup causes that or doesn't prevent it. The fact that it can be heredity and it can just happen indicates that some combination of gene situation is likely involved in setting the conditions for that to potentially happen.

    If we ever do come up with a drug that should regulate the body in a state where it's unlikely the protein does build up, is that a drug everyone must take to remain free of AD? I'm unlikely to know. Identifying the human genome is a great thing, but to RSA's point, it's the combinations and understanding the final effects of each of those combinations where all the work is.

    Last comment is that I'm certain designer babies are in our future. You scan the man and the woman's DNA and if the markers for Down Syndrome are there, you replace one of the letters and no Down Syndrome occurs. If certain markers are found like in sickle cell enemia, that family is informed so that their children can be informed that they have the marker and should go this route to prevent it. That may possibly be when AD is checked if such markers are also found to exist. My money's on that square.
    • CommentAuthormyrtle*
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2017
     
    The problem with focusing on preventing a buildup of plaques and tangles is that recent autopsies of very elderly but mentally healthy people show that many of them also have plaques and tangles. So it's likely that there is something about some people's brains that protects the neurons from being damaged.
    • CommentAuthorCharlotte
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2017
     
    Right Myrtle. There is still so much mystery. Maybe the plaques and tangles have nothing whatsoever to do with Alzheimer's.
    • CommentAuthormyrtle*
    • CommentTimeJul 21st 2017 edited
     
    Possibly. Or it may be that the plaques and tangles do cause damage but the brains of some people have a way of preventing that damage. The problem is that for years, researchers have assumed that people with plaques and tangles will invariably have Alzheimer's. It turns out that assumption is incorrect.
    • CommentAuthorxox
    • CommentTimeJul 24th 2017
     
    Some studies point to the plaques and tangles being the brain's defense against what is really causing the damage. Or that plaque is necessary but not sufficient to cause Alz. This shows how far away we are tackling Alz.
    • CommentAuthorCharlotte
    • CommentTimeJul 24th 2017
     
    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-07-phase-iii-ii-alzheimer-drugs.html

    This article tends to be more optimistic than the first one. This information comes from the Alzheimer's Association International Conference recently held in London.

    Honestly I don't hold out hope for anything soon.