https://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-wrong-ab-21156/ Summary: Recent scandals in Alzheimer’s research and problems with medications designed to help those with Alzheimer’s but failing to deliver sufficient results have researchers questioning the overwhelming focus on amyloid-beta in Alzheimer’s research.
New evidence came to light in Science that researchers had faked images in a paper published 16 years ago—a paper that other researchers had trusted and relied on as they did their own work.
And what do all of these developments have to do with one another?
They’re all tied to the molecule beta-amyloid, the plaque-forming sludge that gunks up the outside of brain cells. The molecule that decades of research has focused on as an important factor in the disease and potential treatments to reverse it.
Thankfully But in fact, scientists at the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Center and elsewhere have spent years looking beyond amyloid for answers to the roots of dementia and ways to prevent or treat it.
The paper at the center of the scandal has to do with a specific form of amyloid, AB*56, that was put forth as an important “toxic oligomer” encouraging plaque formation.
But Paulson says he and many of his colleagues have not paid much attention to it for many years, because researchers haven’t been so successful at achieving the same results that the original researchers claimed.
“We believe much more attention needs to be paid to other factors and proteins underlying various dementias, ranging from environmental factors, to the immune system, to specific molecules like tau, which is the other hallmark protein of Alzheimer’s disease,” he explains. “In my view, the Aduhelm story underscores the importance of continuing to look for other therapeutic targets in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia.”
New evidence came to light in Science that researchers had faked images in a paper published 16 years ago—a paper that other researchers had trusted and relied on as they did their own work.
Another case of “Unsettled Settled Science (USS)”
Reminds me of Ansel Keys massaging the data that led to the low fat diet, the root cause of the obesity epidemic.
This article examines how faith in science led physicians and patients to embrace the low-fat diet for heart disease prevention and weight loss. Scientific studies dating from the late 1940s showed a correlation between high-fat diets and high-cholesterol levels, suggesting that a low-fat diet might prevent heart disease in high-risk patients. By the 1960s, the low-fat diet began to be touted not just for high-risk heart patients, but as good for the whole nation. After 1980, the low-fat approach became an overarching ideology, promoted by physicians, the federal government, the food industry, and the popular health media. Many Americans subscribed to the ideology of low fat, even though there was no clear evidence that it prevented heart disease or promoted weight loss. Ironically, in the same decades that the low-fat approach assumed ideological status, Americans in the aggregate were getting fatter, leading to what many called an obesity epidemic. Nevertheless, the low-fat ideology had such a hold on Americans that skeptics were dismissed. Only recently has evidence of a paradigm shift begun to surface, first with the challenge of the low-carbohydrate diet and then, with a more moderate approach, reflecting recent scientific knowledge about fats. [emphasis added]
Reminds me of Ansel Keys massaging the data that led to the low fat diet, the root cause of the obesity epidemic
Except that he didn’t. That’s the problem with cherry picking internet articles that give you your opinion…they oftentimes provoke False Memory Syndrome.
Here’s a bit of background on the Seven Nations Study (conveniently found in your Wikipedia link) As well as the basic information, there’s an excellent couple of chapters on how the so called cherry picking has been misrepresented by writers over the past decade (that’d be the implication that he actually studied far more countries and whittled it down to the seven that most supported his hypothesis)
While it’s perfectly true that many Americans subscribed to the ideology of a low fat diet , (per your second link) a good many of those same Americans didn’t actually eat the diet they subscribed to. Quite the reverse. On a percentage basis, maybe…but in real terms actually ate far more carbs (especially the sugars added to the fake low fat foods) and even slightly more fat. More of everything, in fact.
Big deal. All science is unsettled settled science.
Science has no interest in one’s beliefs, politics, wants, or desires. It is agnostic. It just doesn’t care what you think.
Science makes conclusions based on our limited understanding of the world/universe we exist in. As we learn and discover new things, current science may be confirmed or modified.
In fact, what makes science such a powerful tool is it’s ability to adapt to new things we learn. Science changes as knowledge increases.
I’m sure I screwed up something there, but I’m willing to make modifications to the above if needed.
And while science is never perfect in its explanation of the world around us, it is almost always the best we’ve got. Alternative explanations are generally inferior to accepted science, until they are proven by experimentation to be better. And that doesn’t mean the old science was wrong. (Although sometimes it is - as in the planets and sun revolve around the earth.) Most commonly, the old science was incomplete. E=mc^2 works in ordinary situations. But it fails when pushed to it’s limits - to situations that are not ordinary on earth. And so science progresses forward, giving a more complete explanation.
Reminds me of a story my father, a former Chief of Medical Research for the Army, used to tell. Apparently, there was a large, world wide, cross cultural study of diet and heart disease … the one that kicked off the whole sodium is bad thing. The thing was, that when they did the chemical analysis of the diet in each country, they ignored any “condiments” … which means that for Asians they ignored the soy sauce. Think that might have altered the results?