Thursday, September 8, 2016

If Alzheimer’s disease was Treated like Cancer

The 2016 Cancer Moonshot, headed by Vice-President Joe Biden, the most potentially funded-health research enterprise in the USA just issued a set of 10 recommendations for cancer research. The Blue Ribbon Panel of expert advisers suggested basic steps in research that are very similar to the steps we should be taking in dementia research if we are serious about a cure. What would these Blue Ribbon Panel of expert advisers advise on dementia? Perhaps something along the following lines below:


  1. Establish a network for direct patient involvement; engage patients to contribute their comprehensive dementia profile data to expand knowledge about what therapies work, in whom, and in which types of dementia.
  2. Establish a dementia immunotherapy clinical trials network devoted exclusively to discovering and evaluating immunotherapy approaches.
  3. Develop ways to overcome dementia’s resistance to therapy, through studies that determine the mechanisms of misfolded proteins, in addition to the Beta Amyloid and Tau Protein.
  4. Create a national ecosystem for sharing and analyzing dementia data so that researchers, clinicians, and patients will be able to contribute data, which will facilitate efficient data analysis.
  5. Intensify research on the major drivers of early onset dementia; improve understanding of the genetic component of early onset and use new preclinical models to develop inhibitors that target them.
  6. Minimize dementia treatment's debilitating side effects; accelerate the development of guidelines for routine monitoring and management of patient-reported symptoms to minimize debilitating side effects of dementia and its treatment.
  7. Reduce dementia risk and dementia health disparities through approaches in development, testing, and broad adoption of proven prevention strategies.
  8. Mine past patient data to predict future patient outcomes; predict response to standard treatments through retrospective analysis of patient specimens.
  9. Create dynamic three-dimensional maps of human dementia evolution to document the genetic lesions and cellular interactions of each neuropathological event  as it evolves from a preclinical to advanced dementia.
  10. Develop new enabling dementia technologies to characterize neuropathology and test therapies.

For a complete summary of the faults with Alzheimer’s research and why we need a similar Blue Ribbon Panel of expert advisers of Alzheimer’s disease:

Garrett MD & Valle R (2016) A Century of Confusion in Researching Alzheimer’s Disease. Dementia: The International Journal of Healthcare 2(2), 13-22.

Garrett MD, Valle R (2015) A New Public Health Paradigm for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. SOJ Neurol 2(1), 1-9.

Garrett MD & Valle RJ (2016).A Methodological Critique of The National Institute of Aging and Alzheimer’s Association Guidelines for Alzheimer’s disease, Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment. Dementia: The International Journal of Social Research and Practice,15(2) 239–254. DOI: 10.1177/1471301214525166

Garrett MD (2015) Politics of Anguish: How Alzheimer's disease became the malady of the 21st century. Createspace. USA

© USA Copyrighted 2016 Mario D. Garrett

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