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Alzheimer's Fully Reversed in Mice, Scientists Say (futurism.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer's disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn't even clickbait.

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[–] 91 points 9 months ago (18 children)

In a mouse model. The mice don't have alzheimers they have... something we gave them that looks like it... Hopefully it is similar enough

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I didn't read the whole thing but apparently only in 5xFAD mice. I wish they would have also tried it in a Tau model like PS19.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Both pointless. Mice do not get neuronal loss like human disease. These diseases have been stalled for 30 years on animal models generating "high impact" manuscripts that go nowhere.

    Meanwhile, in human research, just taking vaccines can lower AD incidence by 30%. For real, proven. Not "soon", not "within 5 years" . That is far mor relevant than animal model studies.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    If you're talking about the infectious brain hypothesis, I agree. I'm submitting a manuscript on this topic right now. I wouldn't say that all mouse studies are pointless though. People just tend to design and/or interpret them poorly due to ignoring limitations. Mouse and human physiology are in fact more dissimilar than the majority of researchers seem to acknowledge.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    There has been a fucking epidemic of MD/scientists running to the media with miracle cures lately.

    Mice do not get Alzheimers, they were engineered to show one aspect of the disease that has been promoted by fraudulent studies. As for the reversal, mouse brains are highly plastic and similar to a human baby, nothing like a >60 year old.

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we'll save test tubes from cancer...again.

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  • [–] 39 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Dude it's worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So...jaded.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Do tell

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    There is a lot of incremental research that gets transformed into ZOMG YOU GUYS!!! by the research office. The journals are full of papers demonstrating a complete rescue of a disease model ( and I'm an author on some of them). What the papers are really demonstrating is the inadequacy of the animal model.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com's whole schtick. There's so much happening in science that doesn't get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer's gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago*

    I agree the field is full of subpar sensationalist coverage. I didn’t find this case so terrible as such things go. People in the thread were all freaking out about how “It’s not really Alzheimer’s, it’s something like Alzheimer’s which we did to the mice! Nothing to see here!”

    Which is an overreaction. On the one hand it should be obvious up front that mice cannot have actual human Alzheimer’s because they are fucking mice. So setting those semantics aside, something happened here, and people seemed disappointed that it wasn’t everything.

    So I think both of our points are valid here. Yes, coverage of science is terrible, but anyone who wants to follow science should be prepared for some very incremental advancements.

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