Apparently, Big Pharma stopped researching memory loss because they tried but lost a load of money doing so. Everyone knows alzheimers is up there as a major health issue, but the big companies have been waiting for one, brilliant breakthrough before piling in there. Have two such breakthroughs actually occurred, and will they prove effective?

An antibody, called “aducanumab” (why can’t they devise pronounceable names?) that can almost completely clear the visible signs of Alzheimer’s disease from the brain has been discovered by two small pharmaceutical companies in a breakthrough that appears to be promising. Researchers scanned the brains of people with the degenerative condition as they were given doses of the drug, which is based on an immune cell taken from the blood of elderly people aged up to 100 who showed no signs of the disease. After a year, virtually all the toxic amyloid plaques that build up in Alzheimer’s patients appeared to have gone from the brains of those given the highest doses of the antibody.

Secondly, German scientists have devised a blood test that may be able to predict Alzheimer’s up to 20 years before symptoms start to show. Previous research has shown that the clusters of amyloid-beta peptides form up to 20 years before the Alzheimer’s manifests itself. The blood test was found to have an accuracy rate of 84% in identifying the build-up of these clusters. (adapted from articles in New Scientist and The Independent)

Memory loss is the thing that frightens all old people, almost without exception. It is one of the fears that destroys ataraxia and ideas of a pleasant life. (I know whereof I speak – names go in one ear and emerge immediately through the other without any intervening recollection, along with an increasing number of words). I don’t believe in extending life willy-nilly, but I do believe in making life happy while it does last. That is very Epicurean.