Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsign | Hacker News Reader

"Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence" and all of that, but...

Alzheimer's (like a gazillion other diseases) is a product of senescence, and senescence is a subject that faces strong ideological headwinds. That leaves the medical system in a situation where they want to treat the symptoms (the diseases) instead of the root cause, and treating the set of symptoms that we call Alzheimer's is going to be tough.

View on HN

The single best predictor of Alzheimer’s disease is chronological age. Yet of NIA’s $4.5B FY2025 budget, about 60% goes to Alzheimer’s and related dementias; only 9% to the Division of Aging Biology, which funds the basic mechanisms of aging itself.

The insider joke is that the “A” in NIA stands for Alzheimer’s. The deeper and sadder joke: when you fit cognitive trajectories within the subset of people who go on to develop AD, about half of the variance in their test scores is accounted for by chronological age alone.

We’re spending seven times more on the disease than on the clock — and the disease is mostly the aging clock.

Go figure.

As a society we are so used to seeing our grandparents and parents die that thinking otherwise is near impossible. I wish we saw ageing as a disease it is, instead of a "natural therefore good" thing.

Yes, and less than $1 billion/year spent on the basic biology of aging by NIH/NIA. Funding for research on the root causes of aging is decimal dust compared to distal consequences such as cancers, cardiopulmonary diseases, renal failure, immune diseases, Alzheimer’s, etc.

NIH is great at tactical research but terrible at strategic research, and politicians do not help much ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com