- cross-posted to:
- publichealth@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- publichealth@mander.xyz
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.
An unforgettable moment for those mice
Underrated comment.
Aahh, those lucky mice. Yet another cure for Alzheimer, without counting the multiple cancer miracle-like cures.
Any news for human yet?
problem has getting human subjects, thats why animal testing is done cant really test unsanctioned compounds a live patient. for example even studying something like varicella virus is difficult because it only infects humans, you have to bio-engineer mice so much to accept a varicella virus, also they are looked at Simian versions.
Where is that comic about reporters creating misinformed headlines about science?
Mouse grandpa: John?
Mouse Grandson: Grampa, you remember me?
Mouse grandpa: Yes, I remember. It’s all coming back now. You ate my cheese and fucked my wife you piece of shit!
Sounds of mouse battle reverberating
Ew.
Oh, yeah? How come they still cant tell us how fucking magnets work?
Eat shit, “science.”
I believe this population of super-mice we are making that are immune to all disease will be the dominant life form on earth after we have extincted ourselves. Im in favor of this future.
42
They will do our bidding in forever thanks to us.
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
We did something to the mice then rescued it in a different way. Hooray! Next we’ll save test tubes from cancer…again.
If you can’t get excited by incremental advancements, you should probably unsubscribe from science as a topic.
Dude it’s worse than that. I was a working neuroscientist for almost twenty years. So…jaded.
This is why almost everyone does development, not research.
Do tell
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.
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.
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.

I feel like if the average person had any remote idea just how gloriously, horrifyingly complicated the human body is, we would be simultaneously far more skeptical of press releases, and far, far more invested in the actual science going on to figure out how to keep the whole cathedral from collapsing.
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.
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.
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.
Happy to see Lemmy has a “in a rat”-guy as well.
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.
Well I hear we are adding more plastic to the brain through micro dosing micro plastics in our every day lives. Wait…
HAH HEY EVERYONE THIS GUY THINKS MICE HAVE BRAINS MADE OF PLASTIC /s
We… we gave… Alzheimer’s to mice…?
Are we the baddies?
Now we work towards changing elderly people into mice to cure their Alzheimer’s!
Odds are it is at least somewhat bullshit, oversold, to garner more funding.
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All value judgements are subjective. “Better” and “worse” are value judgements, not statements about reality, so they cannot be objective. But subjectively I agree with you that we treat animals awfully, not even mainly in science experiments - at least they have a tangible benefit. Just look at the way animals are bred to be tortured and murdered in factory farms.
Curing disease is undoubtedly worth animal suffering. Once the disease is cured the benefits will confer to all future humans until we go extinct, I am certain if you were suffering from alzheimers you’d be of a different opinion.
point these criticisms at the cosmetics industry.
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would you tell your spouse that after their diagnosis?
cartoonish evil.
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If one had would you have declined? Your house fire is many peoples alzeimers diagnosis.
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That’s worse undeniably, but various curable diseases are in fact like that and animal testing makes that happen less in this world and you oppose it because it wouldn’t save your person? That’s monstrously selfish.
You are not including the US in humanity clearly, because few can afford this kind of drug here.
Yea but the rest of us will still benefit. The US is like 5% of the world’s population, give or take. Okay there’s other countries with shitty health care systems (developing ones where they just haven’t gotten there yet), but I’d reckon like 80% of the world’s population would have easy and cheap or free access to it through government funded healthcare, or at least a better private system than the US. That’s still a net good. Y’all just need to get your shit in order, but unfortunately at this point it’s going to be harder and harder to do it without violence.
The existence of such a drug benefits humanity even if the USes barbaric policies prevent adoption.
furthermore even if nobody in the US got it ever it would still help an unimaginable number of people
what is the logic here? Don’t help medicine move along because of one crazy country?
Advancements are only for the rich in these lands. Far from still being for the benefit, prolonging the rich’s lives is arguably not.
It would be an advancement if the rights to the drug were owned by some sort of benefit corporation, or non profit, or were not sold to the worst people in the world.
It’s not though. They are maximizing revenue with no one in government to stop them, to call them on gouging.
i’m a communist you’re barking up the wrong tree
it’s lab mice. it’s NAD+. i can’t remember because i’m not an ad researcher, but there are 3 models of AD. one is NAD+, two aren’t. Most of the research was going into NAD+ or another, and they discovered that that specific model was not going to help human patients. It did nothing to effect research or funding. that was about… 15 years ago? so forgive me if i don’t get up.
Scientific advancements often seem like the only good news we ever seem to get.
Any drug would cost 20 million a course. Not even exagerating there either. A new one is doing dynamic pricing, charging some as much as 3 million and others over 1 million for a course. For drugs developed with goddamned charity money.
Don’t worry, they’ll get monetized to hell.
Let’s see if it works for Charlie now.
With all the things we have learned from mice physiology, we could make them super-mice that had supreme physique, intelligence and lived well for a hundred years - move over AGI, the mice overlords are here…
Unfortunately, mice don’t get Alzheimer’s disease. This has been a claim for a while in animal models. I’m sure it’s good scientific work, but the press release is making wild claims.










