Alzheimer's Club

Sharon Begley, Science Journal: Is Alzheimer's Field Blocking Research Into Other Causes?" (9 April 2004, WSJ p.B.1) [Free FullText at SFChronicle]

Sharon Begley, "Science Journal: Scientists World-Wide Battle a Narrow View Of Alzheimer's Cause" (16 April 2004, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ p.A.9) [Free FullText at SFChronicle]

Robert Mahley, Sheldon Goldberg, Richard Sheldon, "Letter to the editor: Does Bias Confound Alzheimer's Research?" (27 April 2004, WSJ, p.A.19 [FullText at UCDavis ADRC] [Alexei Koudinov letter to WSJ]

Lisa Sanders, "Companies race for Alzheimer's drug. Disease that afflicted Reagan for a decade has no cure" (10 June 2004, CBS Market Watch)
Leading paragraph: "With millions of lives and billions of dollars at stake, companies are in fierce competition to cure the disease that killed former President Ronald Reagan..." [FullText]

"When Jim Matthews needed to slash his cholesterol and heart attack risk, he joined the millions taking the world's top-selling drug, Lipitor.

After five weeks, he was struck by cognitive chaos and confusion.

All of a sudden, he found himself asking: "Did I go get the mail or did I just think I was going to go get the mail? Did I give my dog her thyroid pill, or did I just think I gave the dog the thyroid pill?"

He couldn't function for hours.

When he came back to his senses, he suspected Lipitor was to blame, but only found one glowing report after another on Lipitor and similar drugs - all called statins.

In fact, some doctors are so high on statins, they seem to think most everyone should take them, that there's no down side. Lipitor's maker even says it may help Alzheimer's patients.

But researcher Dr. Beatrice Golomb warns the studies generating the bulk of the positive press were funded by the companies that make the drugs, like Pfizer, which earns $9 billion a year from Lipitor.

"I made the decision that I really didn't want to take money from the drug industry," says Golomb.

Funded by the government and not the drug makers, Golomb is taking an independent look at studies already done on statins, pinpointing severe muscle problems, which Pfizer has disclosed, and cognitive dysfunction -- not mentioned in patient leaflets.

"We have people who have lost thinking ability so rapidly that within the course of a couple of months they went from being head of major divisions of companies to not being able to balance a checkbook and being fired from their company," says Golomb, an assistant professor or medicine at the University of California in San Diego.

Golomb says statins do help the heart, but may also hamper the brain's performance and trigger other serious problems. She's leading an independent clinical trial to find out what harm statins may be doing. The results should be out in a few months.

Pfizer told us Lipitor's safety is supported by peer reviewed articles and scores of studies,"including the most extensive statin clinical trial program ever conducted." Pfizer "collects all available safety information...and shares (it) with regulatory authorities worldwide."

That may be right for most patients, but Matthews isn't looking for a repeat of his mental meltdown. He's taking a new tactic: trying to tame his cholesterol with diet and exercise

"Up with the good cholesterol, down with the bad," he says."

Source: "Statins' Mind-Boggling Effects" (24 May 2004, CBS Evening News) [FullText, includes free video "Dangers of Statin drugs"] [Neurobiol Lipids Statin collection]

Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post Staff Writer, "Reagan's Experience Alters Outlook for Alzheimer's Patients" (14 June 2004, Washington Post, p.A01)
Leading paragraph: "An Alzheimer's diagnosis means something very different today than when former president Ronald Reagan announced 10 years ago that he had the illness: More than any other Alzheimer's patient in history, Reagan -- with his fame and sunny personality -- dramatically reduced the stigma attached to the deadly degenerative disease, advocates say.

Nancy Reagan, furthermore, has championed the cause of Alzheimer's patients with the kind of clout that few other caregivers could wield, and the Reagan name has helped raise millions for research. Nancy Reagan has also led the fight against federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research -- discreetly challenging President Reagan's most prominent admirer, President Bush, who imposed the restrictive policy..."[FullText]

Jennifer Ryan, "Goodbye came early" (20 June 2004, East Valley Tribune Online)
Leading text: "When Scott Phelps visits his mother, she calls him Bobby. Pauline Phelps gives her son a hug, sits on the couch next to him and forgets he’s there. The 84-year-old prefers to talk to her brother, Paul, or Aunt Shorty, both of whom died decades ago. "We’re ready to go home," Pauline says to the air in front of her. "We are home," Scott, 52, of Ahwatukee Foothills tells her. Not really. Pauline, who is cared for in an Ahwatukee Foothills group home, lost the life she once knew and the mind she once had after participating in a clinical drug trial for Alzheimer’s disease. The drug being studied, AN-1792, held the promise of becoming a vaccine that could prevent or slow the decline of Alzheimer’s — a disease that afflicts an estimated 4 million people nationwide, including 85,000 in Arizona, yet has few effective treatment options. Instead, the experimental drug made about a half dozen people like Pauline worse..." [FullText]

Dembner, Alice, Globe Staff, "Mixed results after trials for Alzheimer's vaccine" (22 July 2004, Boston Globe)
Leading text: "The first test in people of a vaccine to treat Alzheimer's disease produced mixed results, but it showed enough promise that companies are pressing ahead with other vaccines, researchers reported yesterday at the ninth International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Philadelphia. Tests of the vaccine, made by Elan Corp. of Ireland and Wyeth of New Jersey, were halted in January 2002 when 18 of the 300 people in the trial developed a potentially fatal brain inflammation." [FullText]

Jill Adams, "Assessing Amyloid beta. Research suggests a physiological role for the presumed villain" (29 March 2004, Vol. 18(6): p. 25 The Scientist)
Leading text: "Recent work has revealed a potential physiological role for amyloid b, often considered a major culprit in Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology. This suggests that Ab, an ordinarily upstanding protein, turns bad as the result of a mob-type effect, when the physical buildup into plaques promotes neuronal damage and loss. "There's been a growing awareness over the last three or four years that it's not just a toxic peptide," says Hugh Pearson from the University of Leeds, UK..." [FullText]

Sharon Begley, "Fevered Debate Over Alzheimer's Origins Causes Deep Divisions" (6 August 2004, The Wall Street Journal, p.B.1)
Abstract: "AS I WROTE last April, there are growing doubts that amyloid is guilty as charged. Autopsies of people with early-stage Alzheimer's show that the tangles form first, before plaques, in brain regions initially affected by the disease. "If you look at the evidence, it's the tangles that cause neuronal degeneration, and they come first, before the amyloid," says neurologist Patrick McGeer of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who was awarded one of the Alzheimer's Association's top scientific prizes at the meeting.

Another problem for the amyloid dogma is that "almost all aged brains have extensive amyloid deposition, even in people who die with no symptoms of Alzheimer's," says neurologist Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Worse, adds neurobiologist Nikolaos Robakis of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, autopsies of the brains of Alzheimer's victims show that "plaques don't correlate with neuronal death. The amyloid is here and the dead neurons are somewhere else."

No existing drug stops, let alone reverses, the inexorable cognitive and memory decline of Alzheimer's. The one thing baptists, tauists and apostates agree on is that drugs that prevent the disease will not cure it, and drugs effective against early Alzheimer's won't be the same as those that work against late Alzheimer's. We'll need a whole armamentarium."
[Free FullText at SFC]

Jamie Talan, Alzheimer's at 30-something. Five percent of cases are early forms, devastating young lives and families (19 October 2004, Newsday)

Leading text: "Three years ago, Michael Henley began keeping a diary so that he could chronicle a mind that would one day be lost to Alzheimer's. He was 36 years old, and the first hints of the disease came crashing down on his family during a vacation when he forgot that his teenage daughter had gone off with a relative. A year later, he wrote in his journal: "Today was a bad day. I couldn't complete a full sentence." Things have progressed rapidly for Henley, who is now 39 and in the full-blown stages of Alzheimer's dementia. While he still knows his wife and two children, he is not able to hold a meaningful conversation. He loves to walk, but is now timid on his feet. When outside, he has to be led by the hand or he'll wander into traffic. His eyes still sparkle when his wife tells him how much he is loved, but the intimate connection between husband and wife is gone. Only three years ago the main provider for the family, Henley now needs round-the-clock care..." [FullText]

"Cholesterol Drugs May Not Reduce Risk of Dementia" (12 November 2004, Reuters Health)
Leading text: "New study findings suggest that the cholesterol-lowering drugs know as "statins" do not appear to lower the risk of dementia or Alzheimer's disease, except possibly in cases of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. This runs counter to recent reports indicating that these drugs do, in fact, reduce the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The authors of the current study, reported in the November 9th issue of the medical journal Neurology, believe the discrepancy may have to do with how the data were analyzed. Dr. Gail Li, from the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues assessed..."[FullText] [Neurobiol Lipids Statin collection]

Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter, "Lipitor May Aid Memory in Alzheimer's: A small study finds a big change, but it needs confirmation, experts say." (9 Nov 2004, drkoop.com)
Leading Text: "A widely used cholesterol-lowering drug improved memory and cognition as well as depressive symptoms in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, according to results of a small study. "This is the first investigational use in 10 years of an FDA-approved drug that shows promise in Alzheimer's," said study author Larry Sparks, head of the Roberts Laboratory for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Sun Health Research Institute in Sun City, Ariz. "We did find significant changes in a small group of patients..."[FullText] [Neurobiol Lipids Statin collection]