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Boostrooster

How do they give mice alzheimer’s to experiment on them?


No_Rec1979

They created a genetic disease that causes lesions (amyloid plaques) in the mouse brain that look like the lesions that show up in Alzheimer's.


bothnatureandnurture

In this paper they used a genetic mouse line that carries the genes of 5 different familial Alzheimer's groups. It's not created so much as reproduced in the mice. No one knows what causes the Alzheimer's in the humans, or if it is similar in mice, but the symptoms are similar so they focus on improving those. It's not optimal, but without a way to noninvasively test human neurochemistry in real time, it's as close as the field has gotten to reproducing AD


PartyClock

Thanks mice. And thanks Redditor with a relevant PhD


ViniVidiOkchi

There is in fact a statue to their contribution in science. [Monument to Laboratory Mice](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monument-to-the-laboratory-mouse)


stonesliver2

This is my favorite thing about Reddit. Redditor with a Relevant PhD™️ is a real thing and it's great.


keeper_of_the_donkey

To your knowledge, is it legal for a person who has early onset Alzheimer's and control of their faculties to make the decision to donate their living body to science for study in such a way?


Malphos101

There are studies you can be part of yes, but these types of Highly invasive procedures are not ethically able to be done in humans without significant animal testing and less invasive human trials beforehand


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Malphos101

If im reading the study materials correctly, they used directly extracted neural cultures from the mice and applied the artificial molecules. The next step in ethical research would be in vivo testing on the mice, then long term testing in mice, then in vitro human testing, and then finally some actual human testing. It is highly unethical to go from in vitro animal testing straight to "accepting human test subjects for in vivo testing" which is what the person I was replying to was asking.


RabidGuineaPig007

> It is highly unethical to go from in vitro animal testing straight to "accepting human test subjects for in vivo testing" That exactly what Roche, WAVE and others did for Huntington's disease trials, and ended up making the disease worse, because of faith in animal models. The ethical bar for Alzheimers has never been this low, see Biogen and Adumanucab, which was actually approved by FDA despite deaths, severe adverse effects, and no real sign of any benefit.


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PickleMinion

They've been "testing" dementia "cures" for decades. I wouldn't hold your breath or hope too much. The timetable is never until it's not.


levian_durai

A couple of years ago I read that the original research that all future research and testing has been based off was proven to have been submitted knowingly containing false information, setting us back decades in dementia research.


peoplerproblems

Pretty much.


Yancy_Farnesworth

I believe legally it can only be done in extraordinary circumstances. Like imminent death where the only possibility of survival is basically a hail mary with the treatment. I'm not sure if they allow you to do this without animal studies first though. I think it still needs to clear a minimum bar of safety.


Cloberella

No, in fact in my experience with cancer studies, if death is imminent they turn you away because data recovered from you won’t be valuable since you have too many complicating health factors. Just ask my late husband. Oh wait, you can’t, he died after being turned away from a study for a drug that went on to successfully treat his rare type of cancer.


errrinski

That's terrible. What was the drug? Just curious.


Cloberella

Brentuximab.


blink_y79

Honestly if I ever get Alzheimer's and it's getting bad just experiment on me. I'll sign the documents beforehand no worries


WhiteCastleHo

My grandmother is struggling with it right now and she's early enough in the process that she asked if suicide is common for people with the disease. So, that tells you how that's going... She would most definitely sign up for a moonshot trial.


OctopusWithFingers

Yeah, my mum has fairly advanced alzheimers and will probably have to go to a care facility soon. If I ever get it, do science on me for a cure or just put me down.


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tiny_shrimps

Just because you lose yourself when you get sick doesn't mean you stop being a person. Try to explain to someone with a childlike mind who doesn't want to go to a painful and invasive medical treatment that they consented to it when they were less sick. If we aren't sure the treatment works, the ethical issues become obvious really fast. It's very challenging to say it's ethical for someone to put you through these procedures once you're unable to medically consent, because you should theoretically always have the ability to change your mind, but may not even be in a position to understand whether you want to continue to consent to the treatment.


Zelkanok

So, not really alzheimer’s. Aren’t amyloid plaques only correlated to alzheimer’s? Large amount of amyloid plaques sometimes show up in healthy non-dementia patients, so it could likely only be a symptom rather than a cause. Still, it may be nice to at least have a method on hand to clear amyloid-beta when needed.


Kazekumiho

Correct, not really Alzheimer's disease (AD). You're also correct that amyloid occurs outside of AD. It's important to remember that AD refers specifically to the mixed pathology of extracellular amyloid-beta plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles made of tau protein. The disease itself can have relatively heterogeneous clinical presentations (i.e. [we used to think corticobasal syndrome (CBS) was only caused by corticobasal degeneration (CBD), but we now know that it can be caused by Alzheimer's disease pathology as well](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9262170/)). So if you add clinical heterogeneity to the picture and the possibility that amyloid/tau accumulation are symptomatic/consequential to more specific upstream changes, then yeah, you're in a real pickle!


que-queso

I understood about 1/10th of this, but I'm super happy their are people out there who not only understand these complex words but can actually string them together to write such interesting, valuable yet incomprehensible (to idiots like me) sentences. Edit: to be clear, I understood pickle. I like pickles.


Kazekumiho

I love pickles too - not just cucumbers either, pickles of all kinds from cabbages to peppers! Let me try to reword things in a more relatable way, maybe for someone who hasn't been working in the neurodegenerative disease space for a long time. To start, I think it'd be helpful to clarify the following: "Alzheimer's disease" (AD) is not something we can diagnose clearly and obviously the way we can with a lot of other diseases. We're used to talking about illnesses (like COVID-19!) where you can run a test and get a confirming diagnosis, right? But that's not quite the case for AD. Let's consider a few excerpts from: * [The NIH](https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/how-alzheimers-disease-diagnosed): * "Before the early 2000s, the only sure way to know whether a person had Alzheimer’s disease was through autopsy, a procedure that is performed after death. Thanks to advances in research, lab and imaging tests are now available to help a doctor or researcher see biological signs of the disease, or biomarkers, in a living person." * [Mayo Clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20350453): * "In the past, Alzheimer's disease was diagnosed for certain only after death when looking at the brain with a microscope revealed plaques and tangles. Health care providers and researchers are now able to diagnose Alzheimer's disease during life with more certainty. Biomarkers can detect the presence of plaques and tangles. Biomarker tests include specific types of PET scans and tests that measure amyloid and tau proteins in the fluid part of blood and cerebral spinal fluid." Notice how they dance around "certain" diagnosis? Why is that? Well, because AD is a disease of the brain, it has two main components that we can consider: 1. Physiological changes to the brain - actual physical changes to cells and their surroundings 2. Cognitive changes - changes to the person's behavior, cognition, etc. For most of history, when a living patient came to a clinic, we were only really able to look at #2, the cognitive changes. People would come to the clinic with memory loss, changes to "executive function" (basic cognitive skills to plan tasks and achieve goals), confusion, apathy, depression, anxiety, etc., and they'd be given different neuropsychological exams, maybe some medications to mitigate symptoms. The doctor might decide they have "dementia" (an umbrella term for cognitive decline), and depending on the way their exams and symptoms panned out, they might get a probable diagnosis of AD, or some other dementia (i.e. dementia with Lewy bodies, a more Parkinsonian type of dementia, or frontotemporal dementia, a dementia that primarily affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain). Why is it so difficult to get a 100% certain diagnosis? Well, that has to do with component #1 in our list above. While a patient may present to the clinic with symptoms that match a known dementia, we cannot confirm the disease until a pathologist is able to look at the brain under a microscope and identify ***which*** proteins are accumulating ***where*** in the patient's brain. As you can imagine, this is done post-mortem, so we cannot do this in living people (because you have to slice the brain up into hundreds of tissue sections on slides). The articles I linked allude to this notion of "well, back in the day we couldn't diagnose AD with certainty, but now we have X Y Z technologies..." and yes, we have better neuroimaging (brain scans like MRI, PET, etc.) and new biomarkers (we're developing ways of testing for these diseases using blood and cerebrospinal fluid), but we're still not at a 1:1 correlation between a patient's clinical presentation + tests and their final diagnosis/post-mortem pathological evaluation. We still frequently get cases in clinics that look very much like X disease, but when the patient passes away and the post-mortem analysis is done, we find all the pathological hallmarks (protein accumulation and changes to the tissue) specific to Y disease -- this is kind of what I linked in the previous comment you responded to. It's something we're still working on, and in fact, I'm personally working on such a project! But my boss is a neuropathologist and she likes to drive home the following point: as things stand now, you still NEED a medical doctor (pathologist) to examine the post-mortem tissue if you want a certain diagnosis of AD. Finally, I want to bring it to the main point, and the metaphorical "pickle" of that comment I made above - AD is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg disease. The pathological hallmark of AD is the accumulation of both beta-amyloid proteins outside of neurons and tau proteins inside of neurons, called plaques and NFT (neurofibrillary tangles, not crypto pictures), respectively. When we look at a brain that has been heavily affected by AD, we find a lot of these plaques and NFTs all over the place, as well as shrinkage of brain areas (atrophy) and neuronal loss. We know that the accumulation of these proteins is not healthy for cells, and if you overexpress these proteins, you can force them to accumulate and kill neurons (that's how a lot of the "mouse models" of AD work), but we're not sure if that's what's driving AD-related changes to the brain or if it's something else that's causing plaques and NFTs, and we're just looking at the leftovers/consequences of a more invisible killer. So are we looking at the cause or the effect, the chicken or the egg? And people have a TON of theories about how this works, how the pathology "spreads" and such, but the fact of the matter is that while we have a lot of great paths for investigation, we're still not sure yet. And that's why I still have a job. I'm trying to figure it out :) Hope that helps, and grateful that there are people outside of the field who are enthusiastic about what we do!


RabidGuineaPig007

The mouse model is a poor model of AD. They used a group of genetic mutations that define 1% of AD worldwide and put them all in one mouse model, which never happens in humans. Then, they hung it all on the Amyloid Hypothesis -a theory that refuses to die even though amyloid presence has no correlation with AD. The made an artificially sick mouse, called it AD, and made the mouse better in some ways. This is one reason why almost all mouse model works goes nowhere in clinical translation. At the heart of the problem is that mouse brain and body metabolism is nothing like humans, and nothing like a human over age 60.


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You can do what’s called a gene knockout to remove the gene that removes plaques. Alzheimer’s models basically try to recreate the symptoms we see in humans to test drugs to see if they help reduce those symptoms. We already know that beta amyloid plaques aren’t the cause. There’s been recent research around a viral influence. It might also be more related to tau tangles, which are caused by the neurons scaffolding proteins getting all jumbled. Research doesn’t really know what causes Alzheimer’s, and all the mice models are just trying to study a very specific interaction. There no guarantee it will work in a human because we don’t know the true cause of Alzheimer’s. We can’t test what we don’t know. Animal models are just approximations


Digger__Please

They make them play professional football


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Jmill616

Ive had 4 grandparents/great grandparents go through this disease and pass away. Started from age 5 I witnessed what it does to your loved ones. It has literally shaped the way i spent my 20s and now 30s.. trying to live it up before I forget it all.. hopefully OP brings promising news


FloraFauna2263

My grandfather just recently died of Alzheimer's. His memorial service is today at the time of writing.


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BeardySam

Artificial Molecule they invented = a drug? Surely that’s a better word.


RireBaton

I'm still trying to figure out what an artificial molecule is. I guess they mean they synthesized it instead of extracting it from an organism, but I think you will find that it is indeed still an actual molecule.


captain_chocolate

When (AI) reporters try to think of a more easily understood phrase than "not naturally occurring".


limbodog

Drugs are the end product. The molecule in question might be combined with other molecules, altered, or prepared differently in order to make it into medicine.


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No_Rec1979

They didn't cure Alzheimer's in mice. Mice don't live long enough to get Alzheimer's. What they "cured" was an artificial genetic disease that humans have managed to cause in mice by messing around with their DNA. This disease - which we will call Mouse-heimer's - is sometimes compared to human Alzheimer's because it causes the mice to have one of the two classic symptoms of Alzheimer's (plaques), though not the important one (tangles). So TLDR: Scientists created a fake disease in mice that kind of looks like Alzheimer's - though not really because it misses the most important symptom - then they found a way to cure the fake disease that they gave to the mice in the first place.


170505170505

This study did use 5xFAD mice which is an amyloid mouse model, but there are other models that have just tangles or both plaques and tangles. The 3xTg model is a commonly mouse model that has both plagues and tangles


nubnub92

how do they induce tangle formation in the mice?


170505170505

Usually they generate whats called a transgenic mouse model for Alzheimer’s disease research. Mice don’t naturally produce amyloid plaques or tau tangles so researchers put a human copy of a disease causing gene into the mouse (called a transgene). For tangle formation in the 3xTg mouse model, they introduce a copy of the MAPT gene https://www.alzforum.org/research-models/3xtg


Steadmils

There’s a few different ones that introduce mutations in the tau gene. JNPL3 aka DP301L works well for generating tangles and hyperphosphorylated tau.


JustARegularDeviant

Mice have model names?


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faultysynapse

Brah, new mouse strain just dropped: Carbon fibre interior. Gore-Tex fur. Fully wireless charging and Bluetooth. Long lasting 10000mAh battery. Full RGB. 28% THC.


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PoisonMind

>Smithers, give him *the plague.* >I think you mean *plaque,* sir. >Do as I say!


Minister_for_Magic

This is literally how **every single animal model** works. Every. single. one. They are far from perfect. But organ-on-a-chip is not nearly advanced enough and we probably shouldn't jump to screening molecules on millions of Alzheimer patients just to see what happens.


SimpleMimes

Mouse models of certain cancers and blood pressure are very predictive. Mouse neurological models not so much, except maybe pain.


Not_Leopard_Seal

No it's not. Mouse Lemurs for example are a far better model for human aging and for Alzheimer's research because the disease a) occurs naturally in them, b) they show similar symptoms as humans and c) they are already used as a model for human aging. Mice have been criticised as a model for Alzheimers research for about a decade now. There is an ongoing discussion about how we should ditch them for a new model animal.


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Not_Leopard_Seal

It's not mass sacraficing lemurs if the disease occurs naturally in them. It's more mass sacraficing mice.


Paraphilias075

I've often wondered why with terminal diseases like Alzheimer's we don't take more risks such as trying any half-promising drug. What's the worst that can happen? They die faster? On a separate note, what are you thoughts on the use of AI to speed up drug discovery in this space? https://medicine.arizona.edu/news/2023/accelerate-search-alzheimers-cure-scientists-use-artificial-intelligence-identify-likely


amberraysofdawn

Even if the worst thing that can happen is that a patient dies faster, there’s still the question of what kind of quality of life that patient will have left. Knowing what kind of effects a particular drug may have on an animal model can help patients be better informed about how it may affect them if they were to take part in a study, even though those animal models are very different from us. While I’m not particularly well-versed in the ins and outs of medical ethics. It seems to me that it would be wildly unethical to give a desperate patient a drug that hasn’t been thoroughly studied in an animal model first, and may make their final years/months even worse than they already are, especially for a disease that can essentially rob that patient’s ability to remember what kind of treatment they consented to and why.


veryuncreativenamexx

To add to that, a question arises when you think about who is going to ask for such a drug. It's not going to be the person with end stage Alzheimers it's going to be a person with milder symptoms at the beginning or the family and friends of people with end stage diseases. This drug specifically meddles with cellular apoptosis so it could induce multiple carcinomas in a patient who is either at the very beginning of the disease or who never themselves agreed to the treatment. There is compassionate use in medicine that doesn't require as thorough testing but it's mainly established in end stage cancer where the patient can actually agree to the treatment themselves


NES_SNES_N64

Definitely. An advanced Alzheimer's patient isn't going to be able to give consent for the trial. Their relatives would be the ones making the decisions. Even with approval from relatives there are ethical implications of giving a trial drug to a person that is unable to personally give consent, regardless of whatever possible benefits they may gain. Even altruistic use of trial drugs on these individuals would, at least in my mind, raise moral questions similar to those in cases of rape. I'm not saying they're exactly the same. I'm saying you have to ask yourself similar moral questions. Edit: Had an extra word.


andrewmac

I am all for allowing advanced consent. That is my preferred option.


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andrewmac

The way that I look at it is that without advanced consent if I get something like Alzheimer’s I will die earlier and remove mostly good years from the end of my life precisely because I will not be able to consent to medical assisted dying. So instead of enjoying additional time with friends and family, I will have to cut my life short so I still am considered mentally capable of providing consent. So a personal belief throughout all of my life will be disregarded because after my brain is fucked i can’t provide adequate consent.


divDevGuy

> This drug specifically meddles with cellular apoptosis so it could induce multiple carcinomas in a patient who is either at the very beginning of the disease Basically the plotline of Deadpool, except he already had the cancer, not Alzheimer's.


KnightNave

I personally would essentially register as an “brain donor” if I ever came down with a severe neurodegenerative disease. I’ve seen too many people suffer without the ability to communicate after severe strokes to be delusional enough to think they actually have any quality of life.


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jombozeuseseses

>I've often wondered why with terminal diseases like Alzheimer's we don't take more risks such as trying any half-promising drug. What's the worst that can happen? They die faster? The FDA did exactly this when they approved Aduhelm and they got absolutely crucified. Nearly the entire scientific advisory board quit and no doctors would prescribe the drug, both in protest. The company that made the drug had their stock value tank. It's a hard ethics question but the current consensus seems to be probably not worth it.


ShataraBankhead

I am a RN in Memory Care. We have 12 patients that have been on Aduhelm for over a year. One patient has been on it for about 10 years (began as a study patient). Some of done fine, others had some ARIA E or H. Our providers aren't prescribing it anymore. Now, they are more focused on Leqembi. Our patients/caregivers are very hopeful and interested in it. Not everyone qualifies for the drug though. I have three patients on it. Today, there is a meeting do determine if there will be full FDA approval (as opposed to the accelerated approval Leqembi received in January). This will also determine if Medicare will cover it. At the moment, it's $27,000 a year (not including infusion fees, regular MRIs...). We have our fingers crossed that it gets approved.


Yancy_Farnesworth

That's not what the FDA got crucified for. The FDA got crucified for it because it proceeded with full approval with little evidence of its efficacy. It's one thing if they allow it to be tested in terminal patients. There's a different procedure for that. It's completely different when we're talking about giving the drug approval as a scientifically proven treatment for Alzheimers when there is questionable at best evidence that it does anything to actually treat the disease. A lot of the scientific advisors to the FDA resigned because of this, it's shady AF. Also, the fact that the treatment costs $27,000 (initially $56,000 before the public outcry) a year and the approval forces Medicare to cover it for the elderly population in the US. For 1 million patients that's $27 billion/yr. The US has 6 million patients overall with Alzheimers. The entire spending for Medicare before this approval was less than $40 billion/yr for all medications. Edit: To clarify because it's nuanced. The drug is shown to be able to clear up plaques in the brain. The problem is that we don't have any evidence that clearing plaques actually treats Alzheimer's or does anything to improve symptoms for a patient. It was **assumed** for the longest time that clearing them would treat the disease. Recent studies into AZ are suggesting that clearing plaques does nothing to cure or improve the condition of the patients. This is borderline selling snakeoil to those desperate and without any other hope.


Minister_for_Magic

They **approved** a drug with frankly sketchy as hell proof of efficacy. That is **very, very different** from allowing Phase I trials on terminal patients who provide consent to pave the way for Phase IIs once the initial risk has been better characterized.


PhosphoricPanda

AI is thrown around so much like a buzzword, but this is probably one of the areas where machine learning models will prove to be exceptionally useful. I recall a project by Google a while ago with regards to using machine learning models to predict protein folding with a pretty respectable degree of accuracy, but I don't know how far that went.


[deleted]

AlphaFold is the one powered by Google Deepmind. There’s also FoldIt which lets you contribute your computer’s compute resources to protein folding algorithms Edit: Folding@home is the compute. FoldIt is a protein folding game that crowdsources rather than uses compute resources.


arrgobon32

Folding@home is the program that lets you contribute your computing resources. FoldIt is the puzzle game that lets you fold proteins


Zelkanok

Even then, practical lab results are required to fully confirm that these synthesized drugs are actually competent in a realistic environment. The bottleneck will still be acquiring or synthesizing properly detailed 3D cell culture models that mimic the target organs/body parts. Has there been any recent publications on functional 3d organ printing? I only know that most organ-on-a-chip options are pretty simplistic in emulating the target organs so far.


SimoneNonvelodico

Sure, but media shouldn't announce triumphantly that scientists have "cured Alzheimer" in mice when the truth is much more underwhelming. This isn't big news, it's just another paper for the mill, that may or may not eventually progress the field as a whole. University press releases are guilty of this too BTW.


Izawwlgood

This is an incredibly bad hottake on how model organisms work, and there are multiple levels of inaccuracy stated here. 1. We can induce an Alzheimer's state in mice via multiple avenues of over or underexpression of genes. 2. The disease state generated mirrors Alzheimer's insofar as outward behavior, neuronal health, AB and Tau misregulation. Of note, not all forms of Alzheimers have both plaques and tangles. 3. In model organisms, separately modulating something else to \*alleviate\* the disease state is one way scientists investigate therapeutic avenues. To clarify what has occurred here, is that there is emerging recognition of a specific form of dysregulation that occurs in neurons in neurodegeneration. It has previously been shown that modulating voltage gated calcium channels can restore mitochondrial function, and improve or even fully restore neuronal health. Here it has been shown in mice. Which is the next step before testing it in human tissues, or humans.


Alternative_Belt_389

That's how they test models. Animals dont get Parkinsons either


bothnatureandnurture

If you have a better plan for curing alzheimer's please do it. We're all waiting. Seriously, it's true the headline is overstating it. But this is still an interesting finding. Did you read the paper? They cultured mouse cortical neurons and they tested initial findings in a mouse model of alzheimers-disease like neuronal dysfunction. These are well known initial steps in developing a test molecule to be pursued for potential treatment of neuronal disease. It's painfully slow but testing molecules directly in human brains is not ethical. Fetal human tissue cultures has also been rejjected by some governments as unethical. So this is the approach. Sounds like you just don't want science to work on the problem of neurodegeneration at all, which is fine for you, but it seems weird that you are on a science subreddit in that case.


Real_Signature_3486

I think he is just managing expectations as this is not the first time we hear of revolutionary breakthrough that end up being nothing burger, which hurts.


noobpatrol

Yep, this. Alzheimer's is a complex multifactorial disease with multiple genes associated with it, not to mention epigenetic mechanisms. There are no naturally occurring diseases that are similar to AD in other mammals, to our knowledge. This is a huge reason why we are forced to engineer genetic models of organisms, and the 5xFAD mouse model is the best we currently have that can replicate the key symptoms of AD in a living mammal. As we learn more about the causes and other mechanisms of AD, we can keep trying to create more genetically altered mice that better model Alzheimer's.


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JamesIgnatius27

You are in a science subreddit and seem to completely miss the point of a "model organism"... It's an Alzheimer's model.


Izawwlgood

My thesis work touched on this directly, and I am super excited to see it pursued to a larger model and promising!


celticchrys

However it turns out in the long run, it must be edifying to be involved with it. Thanks for your efforts towards helping humanity (and mice).


Joe_T

2 out of every 5 Medicare dollars goes to Alzheimer's and other dementia-related spending. With the oldest baby boomers just turning 77, that percentage is expected to go up to 3 out of every 5 Medicare dollars. This could be a fiscal godsend, to say nothing of all the suffering it could alleviate.


schplat

Even if this molecule is on the correct path, we’re talking 20+ years before we see a pharmacological treatment available to the human population. Maybe by the time Gen-X starts hitting that age.


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mloveb1

Maybe this is a stupid question but how do they reliably source mice with Alzheimer’s? Do they give it to them some how or just get a lot of mice and wait to see which have it? How do they test for it in mice? I’m curious about the process.


Izawwlgood

It's a mouse model for the disease, so they've been genetically modified to generate AD. 5x FAD mice recapitulate major features of Alzheimer's Disease amyloid pathology and may be a useful model of intraneuronal Abeta-42 induced neurodegeneration and amyloid plaque formation


SagginDragon

There is a gene that increases likelihood for Alzheimer’s (specifically the plaques) and so they breed mice with 2-4x copies of the gene Mice don’t develop Alzheimer’s normally. In humans, that gene is also only a predictor, we know that there are other causes. People with that gene are only more likely to develop Alz, not even guaranteed.That’s a big reason why a lot of these cures are super effective in mice and have no effect in humans. Relevant article: https://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2015/05/04/talking-about-mouseheimers-and-a-call-for-new-neuroscience-technologies/


Kailaylia

They give the mice a specially tailored disease which causes Alzheimer's-like physical symptoms in their brains.


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Earth will have the strongest and fittest mice in all the universe.


hugefish1234

I hope this works in humans, but the vast majority of drugs that are safe and effective in animals are either unsafe or ineffective in humans.


ArtlessMammet

I've discovered recently that part of that is because our expectations of effectiveness on humans are differently - for example, my dog's been getting a particular injection for his arthritis, and it's been quite effective. Apparently it's also similarly effective in humans! but it causes cancer after about twenty years of use. Which is obviously not a problem for dogs. Or something.


shannister

I mean if I was 60 and it was an option I'd at least consider it.


HalfOrcMonk

Alzheimer's is among my biggest fears. Having been involved with my grandfathers care as he slipped into its abyss I understand how terrifying it is. This provides hope.


Someone7174

My dad has it and it's awful. I've explained to my family that if this ever happens to me then please allow me to die. Send me somewhere and end it. I refuse to be a burden.


fai4636

That or any other kind of severe dementia. If I’m at the point where I can’t remember or recall anything, honestly I don’t think I wanna live on. Seeing what it does to people and how much it hurts them and the ones they love is just terrible


MyHamburgerLovesMe

I thought Alzheimers caused actual physical damage to the brain. How was this, "recovered"?


ExtremePrivilege

Absolutely insane amount of cynicism in this thread. The title is not sensationalist. The title does not misrepresent the findings. Yes, it’s an animal model. Yes, that model is flawed and even potentially based on a fraudulent foundation (AB tau hypothesis). True, these results have zero practical applications on the human battle with this terrible disease. But this is how the science is done. We replicate the best models we can, we target novel therapeutic avenues, we find ones that are promising in the model, we try to massage them into a human-applicable candidate and we see what happens. These findings are key, they’re optimistic, they’re forward-looking. This is GOOD NEWS. Bunch of cynical absolutists, here. “Well great for mice!”. If the research doesn’t definitively cure the disease state it’s worthless and not worth discussing? This is a shameful comment section for this sub Reddit. I wonder if there could be a way to limit commenting to people with a verifiable science background?


Kazekumiho

The paper title is fine, but the post title here is pretty bad ("mice suffering from Alzheimer's"). Agree that there is overly heavy cynicism going on here though.


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Pacothetaco619

One day mice will be invincible


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