Alzheimer's Treatment Mooted 79
aminorex writes "Enbrel (etanercept) has been immediately, markedly, and consistently effective in all Alzheimer's patients, according to a report in Science Daily. The original research article is available online at the Journal of Neuroinflammation web site. "We can see cognitive and behavioral improvement in a patient with established dementia within minutes of therapeutic intervention" comments one Journal editor."
"All Alzheimer's patients" may be over-optimistic, but according to the article, though the research it concerns has been heavily focused on a single patient, "many other patients with mild to severe Alzheimer's received the treatment and all have shown sustained and marked improvement."
Re:Log term effects? (Score:3, Informative)
potential risks of etanercept, including infection, cytopenias, possible increased risk of lymphoma and demyelinating disease, death, eye inflammation, and congestive heart failure;
actually, they do (Score:5, Informative)
1. To bring up as a subject for discussion or debate.
2. Of no practical importance; irrelevant.
Very obnoxious word that way.
Re:How about a study with n1? (Score:5, Informative)
I know it's wrong to read the article, but to work on Alzheimer's, the drug was injected into the spine. This is definitely an off-label use. Most likely, it doesn't cross the blood brain barrier. If this works, it might be possible to make a similar drug which can cross it.
Re:Log term effects? (Score:2, Informative)
No.
The average person with Probable Alzheimer's Disease status (there is no such thing as certain, until we take your brain and slice it and stain it, actually) has a life expectancy, even if they got early onset AD at around age 40, of at most 20 years.
Re:Log term effects? (Score:4, Informative)
I think a 75 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's wouldn't blink at taking a chance on that. Coming down with cancer at 115 is not going to impact him much. He'll probably have died 15-25 years prior.
One patient? Competing interests? (Score:3, Informative)
Pardon me while I await the large sample, randomized controlled double-blind study by authors with no competing interests to confirm these findings.
Results of a few minutes of work (Score:4, Informative)
Re:actually, they do (Score:4, Informative)
The verb "[to] moot [something]" is to raise an issue for the specific purpose of displaying it to be unimportant; this is the sense in which the article uses the word. Mooting something is an active and target-specific process whose intent is to weed out irrelevancies. If you have done either 1 or 2, but not the other, you have not mooted something. There is only one meaning, and it is not internally inconsistant at all.
Meaning number two is also the way the past tense adjective is spelled/pronounced. However, it is common in English to have an action and its result adjective be the same, despite that the result adjective represents only the end state of the action: I shot him, he was shot; what you've suggested is to point out that shot has two meanings, one to engage in the act of shooting someone, and also two, to be in the state representing having been hit by a bullet. The verb and its past tense correlated adjective are simply frequently structured thusly.
It's interesting, though, that this divide should seem apparent.
Re:Alzheimer's and growing old (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure circumstances vary widely, but my experience is just the opposite. In the last few years my wife and I have lost all four of our parents: hers to heart disease and Parkinson's, mine to heart disease and Alzheimer's. None of them is a picnic, but from what I saw, Parkinson's was a much harder road then the others. The initial diagnosis of Alzheimer's was devastating to my mother, but as the disease progressed she lost track of the fact that she was severely impaired. The world became a very confusing and sometimes frightening place for her, but death and suffering no longer loomed over her. Life was lived minute to minute. Some minutes were good, and some were bad, but they never lasted very long, and there is some comfort in that. My father-in-law had a Parkinson's like condition and retained his mental acuity to the bitter end. For three years he could fully appreciate the gradual process of being buried alive in his own body. He bore it stoically, but you could see how frightening it was.
By contrast, the deaths from heart disease were traumatic, but quickly over.