Scientists Find Alzheimer’s Treatment While Trying to Cure Diabetes

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35 points·Jerry2··7 comments

I've looked at this paper only cursorily, but the treatment effect is so fast and profound that it seems too good to be true. The recovery of near normal behavior on the cognitive (navigation) task arises less than a week after treatment.

A huge number of questions remain, since this novel drug hasn't been tested for safety at all, even in mice. And of course, you also have wonder how similar this mouse model is to human AD. But the results are stunning.

[I wonder how it happened that all the authors of this paper are different from the creators of the novel triple agonist diabetes compound. And what led them to consider testing the compound on AD?]

If you look at the paper you can see it was poorly reviewed/edited (eg "trainning day" in figure 1).

Also, there is no mention of blinding so they probably skipped that (key) step. Nor do they show us plots to demonstrate that behavior correlated with the histology/etc.

Finally, they assess memory using the water maze. There is no reason to think the effect of the drug was on memory vs anything else like hunger, anxiety, etc: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2663577/

Original study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000689931...

Press release: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/lu-dd122017....

This link between Alzheimer's and Diabetes isn't random as the title implies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyloid

as with all such very early stage press releases: i'll believe it in 15 years; god speed.

I am not actually pooh-poohing the work, but it's way too early to get excited.

So its a learning drug? Would it have an effect on someone without AD? (or diabetes)

Define "cure diabetes"

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