alt Hacker NewsThe major problem has been lock-in of the Abeta 42 peptide fragment as the cause. This monomaniacal focus was rewarded by grant awards to team players.
Karl Herrup has a terrific book on the topic How Not to Study a Disease — The Story of Alzheimer’s from MIT Press (2021, ISBN 9780262045902). He did not win many friends but I think he is right.
The consensus now is that many factors contribute to the heterogeneous diseases we now call Alzheimer’s.
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Reminds me of schizophrenia. A hodgepodge of different things lumped into a single label of "broad class of things we don't understand"
There’s another book mentioned in the podcast called “Doctored.” The gist is: bogus “science” led to loads of money / research going in a direction that was effectively fiction.
People love to praise “the science” when they mean the scientific method. What they always seem to forget is that method is executed by humans. Imperfect, sometimes ego driven humans.
The article (or I guess more accurately "podcast transcription") seems to be saying that this lock-in essentially happened due to fraud, since some of the data was intentionally doctored to get the intended result. One of the guests seems to be an author of a different book about this (with the other guest being the scientist who apparently uncovered this). I can't personally attest to the accuracy of anything they said, but they're at least alleging that it was a lot less benign than it sounds like you're describing.