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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone noticed that Alzheimer’s research tend to hit the front page much more than other medical news? I’ve been wondering why for a while.

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Probably because, barring completely antibiotic resistant bacteria or some super-virus, if you live in a high-income area, you are either looking at dying due to your heart giving out, or your brain.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...

“Deaths due to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias have increased, overtaking stroke to become the second leading cause in high-income countries, and being responsible for the deaths of 814 000 people in 2019.”

And given the nominally cerebral bent of this forum: kinda makes sense we’re freaking out about our brains throwing a kernel panic someday.

I think the third one is cancer. And I think there is quite a bit of press releases on new possible methods and drugs on it.

We’ve made an obscene amount of progress on cancer, and we’re getting better daily. We’ve made 0 progress on Alzheimer’s in ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY.

I would rather have AIDS and Ebola at the same time than Alzheimers.

To be fair, for a lot of human history we didn't long enough to see it, so we can't blame them for it.

I really hope that’s not a choice you have to make someday.

HN workers probably tend to be highly educated and the idea of slowly sinking into dementia is especially terrifying for them. The whole amyloid hypothesis has been debated for decades as well, so by now a lot of people are more familiar with alzheimers research vs others

I think it's because Alzheimer's essentially ends in people you know, turning into a person that you don't know. They basically turn into someone else.

Because that has a more direct emotional affect on those around them, it gives people a stronger desire to want to eradicate it.

Yes, I've noticed that Alzheimer's seems to be unusually popular on HN. I think much of it is the appealing narrative of those silly scientists and their amyloid hypothesis when the cause is obviously (pick one) sugar/inflammation/herpes/aluminum/tau/bacteria/immune/etc.

Is one of the five or six big medical problems of our time.

You are probably right. How would a list look like? In no particular order, perhaps:

Cancer ALS Alzheimer Diabetes Covid AIDS

Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Alzheimer's, and Diabetes would be an easy top 5. Covid was the third leading cause of death last year, and considering the effects on some, it likely deserves more work as well.

source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Senescence is the primary one, by a large margin.

I’d add obesity, and depression/anxiety to that list

Obesity can 100% be prevented and/or reversed. It’s not a medical problem but a cultural one.

Respectfully I disagree and science seems to be supporting that point of view as well.

But, even if you call it a cultural issue, it is still a health issue. It causes billions in additional care, shortens lifespans, is a risk factor for many other diseases. Those facts alone make it a medical problem.

What if the same is true for Alzheimer's? We just don't know yet.

You left out the biggest killer: heart disease.

That and covid deaths and a big chunk of cancer are all caused by obesity

From the comment right below yours:

> As someone who has a close relative diagnosed with this disease, I'm always on the lookout for new information. So this is interesting.

AD is, sadly, rather common, as well as a really devastating disease: you can do nothing but watch as your loved ones become shells of themselves in front of your eyes. You can consider yourself lucky for not having gone through it personally.

>You can consider yourself lucky for not having gone through it personally.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lost relatives to it. It just seems overrepresented vs, say, cancers. But it might just be my impression.

I’m sorry for suggesting you haven’t, my condolences.

Besides the emotional side, AD is more of a single entity than all of cancer, as well as really costly in terms of hospice etc so financially the research is much more viable. The mystery of the mind as well as the state of the art are also a lot easier to get clicks with than “new crazy expensive drug marginally increases the prognosis of one specific type of cancer”, so the latter’s smaller breakthroughs don’t get as much publicity.

Because it's a particularly terrifying and relatively untreatable killer.

*completely untreatable killer

Seems rational that there would be so much interest in a devastating, widespread malady that's cause is not well understood.

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