piefed.eeAlzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say
artifexfuturism.com/health-medicine/alzheimers-mice-cured
In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
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KwakigraOn a human level, the only cure for Alzheimers is prevention. It can’t possibly be reversed. I say this because if you are reading this, you may have a loved one with Alzheimer’s and unfortunately the world is rife with hopeful myths and predatory personalities.
Imagine your brain is a computer. What this treatment apparently did was repair a severely damaged computer back to working order. Some parts of the computer either work or don’t work, so these newly repaired pieces can be considered totally repaired, or the damage “reversed.” However, some parts are impossible to recover. The severely damaged hard drive may be repaired to such a state that it is usable again, but the data which was contained on it before it was destroyed can’t be restored without time travel.
The higher brain functions we take for granted as humans, such as recounting and integrating our experiences, are beyond a brain being able to function or not. It matters a great deal to us and our identites what was stored in them.
If this treatment works perfectly, which I hope it will, it could restore function but can’t restore everything that person was before their severe brain damage. That’s the fantasy people generally want for their loved ones but it can’t be.
Please care for your loved ones as they are.
I agree with your sentiment, but the notion that information in the brain is comparable to binary bits on a scratched CD isn’t really accurate either. Even severely damaged brains have been shown to be able to recover both functions and memories, and it’s unclear exactly how things like individual memories are encoded – or whether encoding is even the right way of thinking about it at all.
That aside, even if some loss is irretrievable, I’d vastly prefer to be left with 80% of myself than 0% of myself.
There are so many misconceptions about the brain and Alzheimer’s that I made my comment as public-facing as possible to address the incorrect but common belief that someone can go from having moderate to severe Alzheimer’s to going back to how they were before. I agree that this would be a breakthrough, but it should not be considered in place of actively taking preventative measures and taking warning signs seriously before there is a serious problem. I have found that Alzheimer’s is a subject so uncomfortable that in effect the average person would only want to think about it after it becomes a problem. The idea that it can be fully reversed may cause some people to be less likely to consider it before it becomes a problem.
As for the details of the brain, it’s still very mysterious and mainly we’ve learned how far beyond our comprehension really understanding the details of how it works can be. Having cared for hundreds of individuals suffering from dementia, mostly being cases of Alzheimer’s, it is very true that hippocampus damage is not the same as losing memories. In many cases I have observed that an old memory may not exactly be lost, but the access to the memory becomes lost until some other pathway is activated which causes that memory to become accessible. Restoring this kind of brain functionality could, as you say, re-create the connections to these memories and other info.
The most common damage of Alzheimer’s on average is Hippocampus damage. The Hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for recording and storing memories. This means that depending on the extent of the damage to the Hippocampus the individual may be unlikely to form almost any new memories at all (typical of my guests, unfortunately). While the memories formed by a healthy hippocampus may still be accessible, the memories a damaged hippocampus didn’t record will never become accessible because they were never recorded. I agree I would still want to come back 80%, but it would be extremely jarring to have new concrete memories when my last ones were from decades ago.
This is aside from the total unpredictability as to how a newly recovered cortex may be different in myriad ways from the cortex which was destroyed. This is an area we don’t have human evidence on to my knowledge. Much better in my opinion to catch it as early as possible and prevent it than to suffer the consequences of the comfort of avoiding the topic since the assumption is it can be totally recovered from. Once again, this research is encouraging and I hope it eventually puts me out of a job. I only say this to encourage the better path for people with only a causal knowledge of these subjects.
Of course, medical reversal of Alzheimer’s is not the same as reversing the brain damage that was already caused by it. Its more like they’ve potentially identified a way of stopping the bleeding, depending on how transferable this or a similar method is to humans.
An unforgettable moment for those mice
Underrated comment.
In a mouse model. The mice don’t have alzheimers they have… something we gave them that looks like it… Hopefully it is similar enough
Yeah, I didn’t read the whole thing but apparently only in 5xFAD mice. I wish they would have also tried it in a Tau model like PS19.
Both pointless. Mice do not get neuronal loss like human disease. These diseases have been stalled for 30 years on animal models generating “high impact” manuscripts that go nowhere.
Meanwhile, in human research, just taking vaccines can lower AD incidence by 30%. For real, proven. Not "soon", not "within 5 years" . That is far mor relevant than animal model studies.
If you’re talking about the infectious brain hypothesis, I agree. I’m submitting a manuscript on this topic right now. I wouldn’t say that all mouse studies are pointless though. People just tend to design and/or interpret them poorly due to ignoring limitations. Mouse and human physiology are in fact more dissimilar than the majority of researchers seem to acknowledge.
There has been a fucking epidemic of MD/scientists running to the media with miracle cures lately.
Mice do not get Alzheimers, they were engineered to show one aspect of the disease that has been promoted by fraudulent studies. As for the reversal, mouse brains are highly plastic and similar to a human baby, nothing like a >60 year old.
Well I hear we are adding more plastic to the brain through micro dosing micro plastics in our every day lives. Wait…
He is talking about neuroplasticity. Not the polymer material.
HAH HEY EVERYONE THIS GUY THINKS MICE HAVE BRAINS MADE OF PLASTIC /s
We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we’ll save test tubes from cancer…again.
If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.
Dude it’s worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So…jaded.
This is why almost everyone does development, not research.
Do tell
There is a lot of incremental research that gets transformed into ZOMG YOU GUYS!!! by the research office. The journals are full of papers demonstrating a complete rescue of a disease model ( and I’m an author on some of them). What the papers are really demonstrating is the inadequacy of the animal model.
There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.
I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”
Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.
So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.
We… we gave… Alzheimer’s to mice…?
Are we the baddies?
Happy to see Lemmy has a “in a rat"-guy as well.
On the one hand, I really really want it to be a world-changing breakthrough for real this time. I’ve been losing my dad to Alzheimer’s for several years now and even if it’s too late for him I would just hope that nobody else has to go through that in the future.
On the other hand, knowing that it’s someone’s business model to jerk at my hope and heart-strings for ad engagement has me more or less ready to fire futurism into the fucking sun
Odds are it is at least somewhat bullshit, oversold, to garner more funding.
I believe this population of super-mice we are making that are immune to all disease will be the dominant life form on earth after we have extincted ourselves. Im in favor of this future.
42
They will do our bidding in forever thanks to us.
Where is that comic about reporters creating misinformed headlines about science?
Scientific advancements often seem like the only good news we ever seem to get.
Don’t worry, they’ll get monetized to hell.
While often true, they still end up making life better for millions of people often enough to be worth it.
Any drug would cost 20 million a course. Not even exagerating there either. A new one is doing dynamic pricing, charging some as much as 3 million and others over 1 million for a course. For drugs developed with goddamned charity money.
Mouse grandpa: John?
Mouse Grandson: Grampa, you remember me?
Mouse grandpa: Yes, I remember. It’s all coming back now. You ate my cheese and fucked my wife you piece of shit!
Sounds of mouse battle reverberating
Ew.
Right so Alzheimer’s results in the death of neurons.
Humans cannot regrow neurons. Most animals cannot.
The few exceptions are in one small area of the brains limbic system.
Again. Not supported to happen in humans. But some theories say it might.
Even so. There is no drug that can restore neurons lost.
No drug that can restore the connections between neurons that are lost.
There already were drugs discovered 20 years ago that cure rats of AD related plaques and tau proteins. Doesn’t work in humans . Probably because those rats are genetically engineered to produce plaques and tau proteins.
Not the same as a human disease model.
Might be a stupid question, but could stem cells do that?
You should really look up human brain organoids, how they are created, and what we are doing with them. You can rent one and make it..do..think things. Sometimes they grow eyes.
They don’t just randomly sprout eyes, you have to give them the hormone that makes eyes develop to have them start.
The most recent Radiolab episode was on exactly that topic.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/brain-balls
Wow thanks for this, that was an amazing podcast.
So a few things.
The brain tissue is formed in layers.
Each layer has specific types of neurons and specific types of connections. Which connect specific regions.
when your brain develops as an embryo, there are two primary ways that neuron connections are formed to make sure the right type of neuron with the right pathway is made.
Scaffolding.
Othe types of neurons and cells are grown in a way so that neurons can “grow up them”. Think of like lattice fences for vine plants. Chemical signals are also sent that tell these neurons where to grow and where to connect. Kind of like a “hey buddy, over here”.
The other big one is folding of brain sections.
This part is kinda insane but as the brain is developing it starts sectioning out pretty early and then these sections do this folding thing. Where they sort of turn themselves onward. This folding also helps form the layers of the brain.
And I guess the 3rd thing I should mention even though you probably figured it out is that these two things cannot occur in adults.
The scaffolding thing isn’t quite as simple as I’ve said. But trust me. It can’t occur in adults either.
So now you know two fundamentals of neuro development that even a fair number of people in my field seem to be ignorant of.
Now what does this mean. ?
It means you can’t just “repair” or “replace” missing tissue.
This is why there aren’t any mammals that regrow brain tissue. None regrow cortical tissue.
The only neurogenesis (neuron growth) observed is a small tiny area in the hippocampus (part of limbic system ) and that’s a whole other complicated thing. But I’m willing to give you the basics if you want. Just ask.
Okay so. Back to fixing the brain.
Same problem as fixing severed nerves in the spine but actually worse. You can’t get a neuron to make a connection if there isn’t scaffolding. So you can strengthen something if there is something there that new connections can follow.
You also can’t easily tell a stem cell to grow into a very specific type of neuron and connect in the right way.
A large portion of neurons are inhibitory. And they must be placed properly.
I give this example to explain why stem cells can’t fix a brain
Let’s say you have a circuit board. And some circuits are burnt out. So you cut up a bunch of pieces of solder and thin wires and scatter it on top of the circuit board and try to power it up.
There is pretty much no way that adding stem cells to the brain won’t result in bad things happening.
There was a study that did this.. It gave people brain tumors.
There are still on going studies to potentially use stem cells but honestly there is a very good reason why mammals can’t regrow cortical tissue.
I did a quick search and was surprised to see people still trying to do this line of research. As I said with the circuit board example, you can’t control the errors that would be created.
Brain neuron connections (aka the architecture) is the mind. You can’t alter these without people loosing something.
A few years ago (7 ish years?) when the study I’m thinking of came out, there was a lot of talk and a lot of studies were cancelled. I was working in pharm Alzheimer’s research at the time at a clinic.
I remember people thought it was going to be some miracle fix. But the brain is much more complicated than , like regrowing a damaged kidney or something.
Which also isn’t currently possible with modern medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_cerebral_cortex
Here this neural tube is talking about that folding I was referring to.
During embryo development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_tube
I’ve got my neuro anatomy book out. It has some great images so here they are. I think the way the brain folds in is really cool.
https://imgur.com/a/Qg5gfrp
Also. First image is the front of the book.
I also have a ebook copy somewhere I got for free on library genesis.
It’s an anatomy book. So it’s not light reading. But it’s also full of real brain images. So if you are interested in the topic, get it on library genesis.
the problem would be getting a specific type of stem cell to do that, likely a pluripotent rather than a totipotent(which is usually a blastocyst after fertiliation) to differentiate into a nerve cell and not continue growing or dividing. because cancer behaves pretty much like a stem cells, if not some are stem cells themselves.
That’s false. Neurogenesis continues well into adulthood. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-book-of-neurogenesis
Just to point out. This article theorizes neurogenesis in the hippocampus MAY be possible in humans because it’s been supported to occur in rats.
This is exactly what I said.
It’s theorized to occur in humans in a very specific area of the hippocampus (not in cortical regions or any other area of the brain,). It’s not supported with evidence to occur. It’s only theorized to occur.
This article is more specifically talking about the research on exercise and hippocampus neurogenesis in rats. Which showed a positive correlation.
Not until after the orange man is gone. Please.
Let’s see if it works for Charlie now.
Now we work towards changing elderly people into mice to cure their Alzheimer’s!
Oh, yeah? How come they still cant tell us how fucking magnets work?
Eat shit, “science.”
it’s lab mice. it’s NAD+. i can’t remember because i’m not an ad researcher, but there are 3 models of AD. one is NAD+, two aren’t. Most of the research was going into NAD+ or another, and they discovered that that specific model was not going to help human patients. It did nothing to effect research or funding. that was about… 15 years ago? so forgive me if i don’t get up.
Unfortunately, mice don’t get Alzheimer’s disease. This has been a claim for a while in animal models. I’m sure it’s good scientific work, but the press release is making wild claims.
With all the things we have learned from mice physiology, we could make them super-mice that had supreme physique, intelligence and lived well for a hundred years - move over AGI, the mice overlords are here…
I bet the mice wish they could forget they are stuck in a lab
only the bad ones ;_; The one where they learn to drive sounds fun af. Can’t wait for the human trials in Maryland.
I mean they look happy
Aahh, those lucky mice. Yet another cure for Alzheimer, without counting the multiple cancer miracle-like cures.
Any news for human yet?
problem has getting human subjects, thats why animal testing is done cant really test unsanctioned compounds a live patient. for example even studying something like varicella virus is difficult because it only infects humans, you have to bio-engineer mice so much to accept a varicella virus, also they are looked at Simian versions.
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All value judgements are subjective. “Better” and “worse” are value judgements, not statements about reality, so they cannot be objective. But subjectively I agree with you that we treat animals awfully, not even mainly in science experiments - at least they have a tangible benefit. Just look at the way animals are bred to be tortured and murdered in factory farms.
Curing disease is undoubtedly worth animal suffering. Once the disease is cured the benefits will confer to all future humans until we go extinct, I am certain if you were suffering from alzheimers you’d be of a different opinion.
point these criticisms at the cosmetics industry.
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would you tell your spouse that after their diagnosis?
cartoonish evil.
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If one had would you have declined? Your house fire is many peoples alzeimers diagnosis.
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You are not including the US in humanity clearly, because few can afford this kind of drug here.
Yea but the rest of us will still benefit. The US is like 5% of the world’s population, give or take. Okay there’s other countries with shitty health care systems (developing ones where they just haven’t gotten there yet), but I’d reckon like 80% of the world’s population would have easy and cheap or free access to it through government funded healthcare, or at least a better private system than the US. That’s still a net good. Y’all just need to get your shit in order, but unfortunately at this point it’s going to be harder and harder to do it without violence.
The existence of such a drug benefits humanity even if the USes barbaric policies prevent adoption.
furthermore even if nobody in the US got it ever it would still help an unimaginable number of people
Advancements are only for the rich in these lands. Far from still being for the benefit, prolonging the rich’s lives is arguably not.
It would be an advancement if the rights to the drug were owned by some sort of benefit corporation, or non profit, or were not sold to the worst people in the world.
It’s not though. They are maximizing revenue with no one in government to stop them, to call them on gouging.
i’m a communist you’re barking up the wrong tree