The End of Alzheimer's [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 Disrupting Dementia You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. -r. buckminster fuller IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to escapc the drumbeat of grim news about Alzheimer's disease: that it is incurable and largely untreatable, that there is no reliable way to prevent it, and that the disease has for decades beaten the world's best neuroscientists. Despite the billions and billions of dollars spent by government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and biotechnology wizards to invent and test drugs for Alzheimer's, 99.6 percent of what we have come up with have been abysmal failures, not even making it out of the testing phase. And if you think there is hope in the 0.4 percent of discoveries that have reached the market—after all, we need only one Alzheimer's drug if it's effective, right?—think again. As the Alzheimer's Association puts it in a bleak reality check, "A genuinely new Alzheimer's drug has not been approved since 2003, and the currently approved Alzheimer's medications are ineffective in stopping or slowing the course of the disease." Although the four available Alzheimer's drugs "may