WSJ Blog Article Commented by Alexei Koudinov

Katherine Hobson. Alzheimer’s Drug Development a Tough Road, Lilly News Shows. WSJ Blog on Health and the business of Health (17 August 2010) FullText

Excerpt: Eli Lilly has scrapped a drug being tested for use against Alzheimer’s disease because it increased patients’ symptoms and was also tied to a higher risk of skin cancer...

...P. Murali Doraiswamy, a psychiatry professor at Duke and author of “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.”: Scientists don’t fully understand the role of the plaques (made of amyloid protein) and tangles (consisting of another protein, tau) that are found in the brains of patients with the disease... “But what we don’t understand is the interaction between the [plaques and tangles], the timeline of events and how they interact with other things, such as inflammation and oxidative stress.”

These days drug developers are primarily focusing on those plaques, hoping that preventing or clearing them will affect memory and cognition in patients...

...He hopes the data from clinical trials — failed or not — will be made available so that scientists can try to get a grasp on those complexities. “It would be a shame if companies keep repeating the mistakes” of others, he says.

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Comment by Alexei Koudinov

I appreciate Katherine Hobson WSJ article. I am a person behind a series of WSJ 2004 articles on Alzheimer's by Sharon Begley. Just to avoid repetitive statements, please see my Open Letter to Forbes editor, regarding Forbes Blog articles by Robert Langreth, quoted at length of the WSJ Blog article under discussion, it is available at www.alzclub.org

As for the comment by Dick G, I must say, that one should be cautious while reading one's contribution online.

There is surely no confidence in an unbiased scientific view even in most credible science publications (see sad examples of Alzheimer's field, Science magazine and Nature Journal as a part of my written evidence to UK Parliamentary Committee on science and technology). The view presented in the WSJ Blog comment on Cholesterol and Alzheimer's is apparently from a non Professional. I remember this, because a number of years ago the same writing (qouted in the WSJ blog comment by Dick G) got to a major professional forum of Alzheimer's disease research alzforum.org as a hypothesis of Alzheimer's. It was then shortly removed for the reason I indicate.

I noticed that the quoted article presents the following statement "...depriving the brain of cholesterol through a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet or cholesterol-lowering drugs, could have the potential to make Alzheimer's disease worse", as the idea of the author. This is in fact an interpretation of our earlier scientific contribution available at a number of articles. The author of the writing at the Dick G link promised to revise the text to make proper acknowledgement of my and my colleagues research ("...These will be reviewed and this article will be changed to properly credit Dr. Koudinov..."), but probably just forgot to do it.

No problem, just see the update for our views on both Alzheimer's and cholestrol, see these two articles: "Amyloid-beta, tau protein, and oxidative changes as a physiological compensatory mechanism to maintain CNS plasticity under Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions" (Journal of Alzheimers Disease 18(2): 381-440, 2009 Oct), and "Cholesterol homeostasis failure as a unifying cause of synaptic degeneration" (J Neurological Sciences, 229-230: 233-40 2004 Dec). Both are written in simple non technical language, and will be available in even easy to understand original near-lay (non edited by journal) editions at www.AlzClub.org, Alzheimer Code and Alzheimer's Amyloid Beta Course