[kanavs]

At my company, we have been looking at understanding how the beta-amyloid interacts with toxic metals in the brain that lead to formation of plaques. We have been studying the use of quantum computers for such complex reactions. Most of us come from quantum computing and quantum chemistry background, so, relatively low experience with biological aspects. And as we dug deep into the reactions and made some good progress, a few established biologists got interested and asked questions around the beta-amyloid hypothesis itself. So, I dug a little deep into the whole field, most of my information comes from the following article: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid... After doing some independent reading, following were my big take aways: - figuring out the truth in this area is incredibly hard. Science already suffers from social quirks like, scientists find it easy to say, 'hey, we replicated the decades-old established results and built something on top of it' rather than risk shaking the fundamentals of the field. All the big shots who did research on Alzheimer's got a lot of money from NIH for decades. Most of the projects were around beta-amyloid and these grants do not stop. So, if suddenly the field agrees that the hypothesis is incorrect, then a lot of people would lose jobs and livelihoods overnight. So, it is not just a scientific problem, the social-economic elements are quite powerful in this field. - Another fascinating thing I learned was that at this point Alzheimer's and beta-amyloid are quite intertwined. In fact, if a patient has Alzheimer's like symptoms but does not have a high concentration of beta-amyloid plaques then, the doctors may bucket such symptoms another form of dementia, with high probability. Coming from a Physics background, I found it incredibly fascinating that we depend on some loose markers and symptoms to define such complex diseases. And as you may have noticed from some of your personal experiences, symptoms sometimes can overlap in diseases and many times not everyone experiences the same symptoms and in fact a single human may experience different symptoms from getting the same disease. - So bottom line, not only we do not fully understand the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's, but there's a chance that we do not even understand what even is Alzheimer's.

[absolutelastone]

There's grants and studies going on for all kinds of treatments for Alzheimer's. Amyloid may be the biggest category, perhaps undeservedly, but it's still a minority of them. Also I think your article may be a bit out of date. Haven't there been more successful studies recently?

I certainly agree about how weak the "ground truth" really is when it comes to these diseases. The theories are necessarily always going to be highly simplistic models that are ultimately wrong but sometimes useful. The only real causation they can show is from studies which show a drug works. And even then they usually don't really understand why (though it's human nature to think that if you can predict something successfully your theory is proved to be true).