Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Disease?

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by trhway on Sunday April 26, 2026 @03:44AM (#47908268)

there is even easier way to estimate the chances of time wasting - it is a "rationalist" website, an "effective altruism"-like version of rationality.

wrt. original post - quickly googled, and that for example https://www.news-medical.net/health/What-are-Amyloid-Plaques... - pretty short and seems to be clear that amyloids do have some correlation while may or may be not the cause.

"Amyloid plaques form one of the two defining features of Alzheimer’s disease, the other being neurofibrillary tangles"

Interesting that the latter is inside the neurons while the former is outside - speaking of complexity. The article also describes that activating microglia back helps with amyloid plaques while this

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33010092/#:~:text=The%20stud...

"The neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and amyloid-ß plaques (AP) that comprise Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuropathology are associated with neurodegeneration and microglial activation. "

Human body reminds a large monolith codebase - fixing one thing breaks some other :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by ifwinterco on Sunday April 26, 2026 @04:22AM (#47908457)

Huge codebase with years of fixes, features and hacks added on top and nothing ever refactored.

It’s a miracle it works at all

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by generic92034 on Sunday April 26, 2026 @05:39AM (#47908866)

It is worse. The code changes are mostly random, only surviving the tests of fitness nature is applying (on various levels though; immediately catastrophic changes on level of cell biology are sorted out). And at least the high-level tests are also random and unreliable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by ravenstine on Sunday April 26, 2026 @06:35AM (#47909140)

So basically it's a codebase mostly composed of bugs, and the features mysteriously work because they're based on bugs that happen to be mitigated by other bugs. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by D-Coder on Sunday April 26, 2026 @02:00PM (#47912363)

A billion years of kludges.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by gruez on Sunday April 26, 2026 @12:53PM (#47911744)

>there is even easier way to estimate the chances of time wasting - it is a "rationalist" website, an "effective altruism"-like version of rationality.

Is that supposed to be an endorsement or a dismissal? The ostensible goals of "rationality" seem like good things, so it sounds like an endorsement, but in the wake of the FTX/SBF fallout they got a bad rap.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why Has There Been So Little Progress on Alzheimer's Dise... by trhway on Sunday April 26, 2026 @03:56PM (#47913571)

there is a big difference between a theory/idea and espousing the theory/idea as an ideology.

[ Parent | on HN ]