Comment by rsyring
7 hours ago
...in mice.
Not knocking the research, cure it already! I just think it should be in the title to avoid false hope.
7 hours ago
...in mice.
Not knocking the research, cure it already! I just think it should be in the title to avoid false hope.
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.
No, you cure it already!
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...
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
1 reply →
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.
4 replies →
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.