A curious result hints at the possibility dementia is caused by fungal infection
economist.com
economist.com
I'll copy partially a few cherrypicked comments of that thread:
pcwalton> It's not [published in] Nature; it's [published in Scientific Reports that is] a "megajournal" affiliated with it with apparently much lower editorial standards.)
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thanatosmin> As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy science. There is no quantitation of staining differences across multiple fields (to demonstrate that the images aren't hand picked), no controls with the PCR study (or even showing the results besides one in the supplement), and no demonstration that the antibodies don't bind to amyloid.* [...]
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niels_olson> Hi, I do research using the same methods: immunohistochemistry. This was done with rabbit polyclonal antibodies. The key being polyclonal. We don't know what those antibodies are really staining. The difference, however, is intriguing. [...]
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nonbel> I bet if they double stain with anti-amyloid-Beta they will see the staining overlap. They just say they used "antibody raised against proteins obtained from C. glabrata, C. famata, C. albicans, P. betae and S. racemosum", so they don't even know (or want to say) what these antibodies react with... [...]
> "As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy science."
> "The discovery, if corroborated by others, could indeed be huge but I'm afraid it wouldn't open up new treatment options anytime soon. Fungal infections inside the body are really really hard to treat in the first place."
> "I bet if they double stain with anti-amyloid-Beta they will see the staining overlap. They just say they used "antibody raised against proteins obtained from C. glabrata, C. famata, C. albicans, P. betae and S. racemosum", so they don't even know (or want to say) what these antibodies react with..."
> "All of the Alzheimer's patients were 79 or older, while all of the control patients were younger than 79 except for one. More than half of the control patients were under 60. That doesn't seem like a very good control to me."
> "This article does NOT provide compelling evidence that fungi are the causative agent for AD. It merely reports correlative observations. You may conclude that antifungal drugs could help patients with AD. You may also think that vaccination or some other mechanism of prevention could reduce the prevalence of AD. These conclusions are simply not supported by the data."
I still think mental illness carries a lot of stigma, and isn't talked about as openly. It's getting better though, and studies like this make me excited that perhaps a cure or significant treatment is possible in our lifetimes.
I lost my grandmother to it, and it was an incredibly, and increasingly, painful 5 years for the entire family, to the point where we felt relief more than grief when she finally passed.
I can only hope they find a cure or a treatment.
It's hard to pinpoint which stage of the disease is "the worst". Is it the very early onset where the patient is still largely "there" but knows of the inevitable decline, the middle stages where your function is so degraded that you can't live fully alone, but you recall what it was like just a few years ago to be able to live at home and you have no particular physical infirmity to suggest that assisted living is right, or the end stage where you can only recognize a few people and display significant concern/fear/mistrust of the nursing staff who are doing their damnedest to help you?
Each stage is terrible in its own right, and the disease progression proved to me that there are indeed medical fates far, far worse than death.
In the same vein we have IBS, a condition which can sometimes be treated with antidepressants.
Fascinating stuff.