Alzheimer's Treatment Mooted

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."

Bad Title

[Anonymous Coward]

Mooted... I do not think you know what that word means.

How about a study with n1?

[Ichoran]

I'm really not sure why this "study" was worth publishing. Where are the statistics of patient status after injection of drug vs. injection of drug-free control? How about a timecourse? Or anything besides anecdotes from one patient?

The hype on the article compared to what is shown is shocking. Even if the compound is a silver bullet that instantly and completely reverses Alzheimer's, you'd never know it from a paper like this. So this is an essentially useless bit of PR.

Re:Log term effects?

[geminidomino]

Not sure if you're kidding but aren't most Alzheimer's patients old enough that 40 years down the road isn't a big concern for them?

Re:Log term effects?

[vux984]

Do we really want to put people on new drugs like this? What if in 40 years all these people come down with some kind of cancer?

Do the math.

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.

And I think even a 35 year old diagnosed with alzheimer's would probably take that chance. Choosing cancer in your 70s vs severe dementia by 40... its not a call I'd find hard to make. I'll take the 'cure' thanks. And maybe 40 years from now they'll be able to control the cancer too.

I would take this with a grain of HCl

[WillAffleckUW]

The scientific discussion is still ongoing, IMHO.

The problem mostly is that we're still dealing with symptoms and not with the underlying mechanistic fault that causes AD.

For example, we're investigating various drugs that remove plaque in the brain, but the problem arises that we don't have anything that actually corrects the mechanism which creates the plaque in the first place. And most of the treatments are moderately risky so far.

Re:How about a study with n1?

[Ichoran]

The issue is not about censoring a plausible idea. The question is whether highly hyped papers with extraordinarily little data are a good idea.

The problem with publications that have n=1 and consist of anecdotal observations is that they are highly unreliable. Since most "negative result" papers never get published, allowing unreliable anecdotes to be published leaves a trail of debris in the literature--you see various promising-sounding papers with no follow-up. You can surmise that the claims were probably false, but it could also be just that no-one was paying attention. It would be good if more negative-result papers were published, but until then, sloppy, unreliable work shouldn't be published in scientific journals. It's a distraction.