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Comment by rsyring | Hacker News Reader

...in mice.

Not knocking the research, cure it already! I just think it should be in the title to avoid false hope.

It's not the fault of the researchers that the general media misinterprets studies like this. Maybe we should instead cast blame on the semi-scientifically-literate people who push attention grabbing headlines regarding promising, but yet far from actionable, study results.

We're adults like you are and can manage both our emotions and the responsibility of understanding that headlines aren't the totality of information.

When it is taking about a breakthrough in treatment of a human disease, it's kind of important if it's not actually in humans

Also "headlines aren't the totality of information" doesn't mean there's no clickbait headlines...

It's utterly unimportant. It's all research and all progress and all works towards our benefit eventually. The fact that an important discovery is still in the mouse stage and not yet in the human stage doesn't make it any less important or interesting, unless you are unutterably simple.

Put another way: the "in mice" doesn't matter because they are studying alzheimers, not mice. the mice are just the lab equipment of the moment. I don't care what kind of glassware or computers they use either.

It depends on what's being studied. There are mice studies on diet which obviously don't carry over to human beings since we don't have similar digestive systems. It may be true (arguable) that all research data is of some benefit, but don't expect people to be as excited about mouse research as human research.

How do they get the alzheimers mice? Article doesn't say. Usually in studies they take healthy mice and induce the condition artificially. That can be a confounding factor since the condition isn't induced in the specimens we care about (human beings). Is it even the same condition?

It doesn't matter how they give mice alzheimers, or any other condition. That's just part of controlling variables to test for one thing. It also doesn't matter that they were fed processed food rather than having to find things in the wild, unless the effect of diet was the specific thing they were examining.

It does not matter how they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse providing they give Alzheimer's to a lab mouse – not a different disorder that happens to have the symptoms of Alzheimer's.

If this was a website for fundamental biology research I’d agree.

As it stands, the headline is misleading and clickbaity.

> the "in mice" doesn't matter

Of course it matters, because that has a direct bearing on how applicable it is to humans and how much time it’s likely to take to be of any benefit to humans, if it ever is. That’s the whole point being discussed.

Also see this comment to help understand why “in mice” is a huge qualifier in this case, because mice don’t naturally develop Alzheimer’s: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50218606

I think the important bit is that, from my understanding, mouse models of alzheimer's dont translate as reliably to humans as it does for other diseases

This is correct, mice don’t naturally experience alzheimer’s or other dementias during their lifespans and the structure of their amyloid beta protein is different as well. To continue using them as model organisms, we have to induce the disease in them by either introducing human genes that are linked with alzheimer’s, or chemically inducing a disease state that we believe to be similar. Mice are much better models organisms for studying metabolism or cancer, by comparison.

The "... in mice" qualifier is somewhat overdone, but for Alzheimer's in particular, it's actually extremely important: mice do not experience Alzheimer's. We test Alzheimer's drugs in mice by artificially inducing something that produces similar dementia symptoms, and then seeing how the drugs influence that progression. If that model is different from how Alzheimer's works--and there's pretty decent suggestions from the history of failed Alzheimer's drugs in humans that our models of Alzheimer's are in fact wrong--then anything that fixes that model has suspect utility.

This is the fifth breakthrough I've seen reported here this year, we'll have an Alzheimer's cure before Christmas!

I despise the current research system for making anyone on the road to progress fight for research budget by publishing wild headlines to get attention.

For people outside of academic circles, this just gives false hope that a cure for their loved ones is right around the corner.

We got the flying car this week so …

No, you cure it already!

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