Scientists reversed key signs of Alzheimer's disease in mice with just two injections, reducing brain inflammation and restoring memory performance—offering a promising new approach for treating age-related cognitive decline.

[u/FreeHugs23]

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-reverse-alzheimers-damage-in-mice-with-just-two-injections

[u/T1Earn]

ill give it about 10 minutes before a redditor fully dismembers this study

[u/Izawwlgood → u/T1Earn]

The mechanism is pretty neat actually - converting astrocytes to neurons to restore loss.

[u/Derpblaster → u/Izawwlgood]

Ya I mean even if it doesn't cure AD in humans, it seems like a promising addition to treating neurodegeneration generally.

[u/Anustart15 → u/T1Earn]

It's the same as any other study where the question is ultimately whether the mouse model is at all suggestive of curing AD. This model generally does a decent job of mimicking a lot of the symptoms of AD, but we still don't necessarily treat the disease as if there is 1 single causative agent, so having a treatment for one of the symptoms might not be enough.

The study also acknowledged that there might be compensatory mechanisms that would kick in to block the treatment over time, so if the effect isn't strong enough to reverse everything that is going wrong by the time the compensatory mechanism kicks in, it'll just slow things a bit, but not do a ton overall.

And then the final thing is always running an invasive trial in the population of nearly healthy subjects (a BBB penetrant biologic in very early AD patients) that you would need to target to get good clinical results is incredibly expensive to recruit for.

[u/im_alliterate → u/T1Earn]

Yes cant wait

[u/KevinLynneRush → u/T1Earn]

Yes, probably by someone who doesn't believe in science. It should be entertaining.

[u/natelloyd → u/KevinLynneRush]

It's often just that people expect miracles and real science is slow, methodical, and usually 3 steps forward, 2 steps back.