The big lie we were sold about Alzheimer’s Disease

https://wallstreetpro.com/2022/07/23/two-decades-of-alzheimers-research-was-based-on-deliberate-fraud-by-2-scientists-that-has-cost-billions-of-dollars-and-millions-of-lives/

On a personal level, this is a really hard article to read and understand.  I worked with memory care patients for 8 years, and watched the tragedy that is dementia claim the lives of hundreds of people.  Watching the grief and sadness in family members as their loved one mentally slipped away.  Watching the families sponsor fund raising events, donating memorial money to Alzheimer’s research…..all searching for a cure to this nasty disease.

This article is a bombshell not only to the world as a whole, but to mental health providers.  A research study in 2006, which has now been shown to be fabricated at best, a fraud lie at the worst, came out with groundbreaking news about the Amyloid B56 protein/tau proteins being the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.  This study became the groundbreaking multi billion dollar empire that became Alzheimer’s research and drug development.  There was a collective relief that maybe we were on to a good treatment path and we could stop progression of Alzheimer’s.  Except for one notable problem.  Every patient taking the Aricept and Memantine did not show a slow or stop progression of their dementia.  It kept chugging along, consuming their mental status, memories, and eventually taking their life.  In fact, the human trial of these medications showed a 99% failure rate.

Genentech had a new drug in trial, Crenezumab, that showed promising results in animal studies.  https://www.gene.com/media/press-releases/14957/2022-06-15/genentech-provides-update-on-alzheimers-

They released the news this past month that it completely failed in human trials.

“Crenezumab did not slow or prevent cognitive decline in people with a specific genetic mutation which causes early-onset Alzheimer’s disease”.

Here is the original paper from 2006 by Lesne, et al., that determined Amyloid B56 was the cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer’s. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04533.  This paper now has the following warning/alert on it: “14 July 2022 Editor’s Note: The editors of Nature have been alerted to concerns regarding some of the figures in this paper. Nature is investigating these concerns, and a further editorial response will follow as soon as possible. In the meantime, readers are advised to use caution when using results reported therein.”  If you want a copy of this paper, you better PDF download it now, because it will probably disappear in the next 6 months.

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record of failure that is beyond comprehension.  But why?  We were SO SURE in 2006 that we had found the cause of Alzheimer’s disease!  Why are the medications working in animal trials but not humans?

Because the entire experiment that led to the discovery of amyloid B56 as the causative agent was a fabricated lie. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

How did we figure out this deceit and sham?  The suspicion that something was more than a little wrong with the model that is getting almost all Alzheimer’s research funding ($1.6 billion in the last year alone) began with a fight over the drug Simufilam. The drug was being pushed into trials by its manufacturer, Cassava Sciences, but a group of scientists who reviewed the drug maker’s claims about Simufilam believed that it was exaggerating the potential. So they did what any reasonable person would do: They purchased short sell positions in Cassava Sciences stock, filed a letter with the FDA calling for a review before allowing the drug to go to trial, and hired an investigator to provide some support for this position.  That investigator was Vanderbilt University neuroscientist and junior professor Matthew Schrag, who tipped over the whole applecart to discover that it wasn’t just that Cassava’s drug was ineffective. There’s good evidence that for the last 16 years, almost everyone has had the wrong idea about the cause of Alzheimer’s. Because of a fraud.

Here is how this ultimate fraud went down.  That 2006 paper was primarily authored by neuroscience professor Sylvain Lesné and well-respected neuroscientist Karen Ashe at the University of Minnesota. It was Ashe who produced the transgenic mice used in the study, which genuinely do appear to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms and that have since been used as the favored animal models for a generation of treatments. Ashe called Aβ*56 “the first substance ever identified in brain tissue in Alzheimer’s research that has been shown to cause memory impairment.”  Both Ashe and Lesné became neuroscience rock stars, the leaders of a wave based on their 2006 paper.  Vanderbilt university neuroscience professor Schrag went back to this seminal 2006 paper and reviewed the Images in the paper.  The photos that were supposed to show the relationship between memory issues and the presence of Aβ*56 appeared to have been altered. Some of them appeared to have been pieced together from multiple images. Schrag shied away from actually accusing this foundational paper of being a “fraud,” but he definitely raised “red flags”, discreetly at first, in a letter sent directly to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Only when that letter failed to generate a response did Schrag bring his suspicions to others.

IAfter reviewing the images, molecular biologist Elisabeth Bik said of the paper, “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.” Should this fraud turn out to be as extensive as it appears at first glance, the implications go well beyond just misdirecting tens of billions in funding and millions of hours of research over the last two decades. Since that 2006 publication, the presence or absence of this specific amyloid B56 has often been treated as diagnostic of Alzheimer’s. Meaning that patients who did die from Alzheimer’s may have been misdiagnosed as having something else. Those whose dementia came from other causes may have falsely been dragged under the Alzheimer’s umbrella. 

Science has carefully detailed the work done in the analysis of the images. Other researchers, including a 2008 paper from Harvard, have noted that Aβ*56 is unstable and there seems to be no sign of this substance in human tissues, making its targeting literally worse than useless. However, Lesné claims to have a method for measuring Aβ*56 and other oligomers in brain cells that has served as the basis of a series of additional papers, all of which are now in doubt.  What makes this stink even MORE is that four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper.  It’s quite possible that the specific oligomer Aβ*56 may not even exist outside of Ashe’s transgenic mice. 

This might be one of the most heart wrenching events to watch unfold.   Nearly 2 decades of money has been potentially wasted on a fraud.  I can professionally attest to the complete and utter failure of commonly prescribed Alzheimer’s medications.  They do zero good.   They were an expensive boondoggle that millions of people took with zero benefit.  Pharma made billions.  Alzheimer’s research made billions.

And I go back to this:

Was Alzheimer’s the original “elderly” version of vaccine injuries, like autism potentially (probably) is in children?  I would lean towards that discussion has to be, at minimum, on the table at this point.  Have the flu, shingles, and pneumonia vaccines precipitated this issue in our elderly population?  Because it looks like the fake mouse with fake plaques study is not the cause here.  So what is?  Coincidental that Alzheimer’s and dementia has dramatically risen since the implementation of adult escalated vaccine schedules?  Probably not.