> Lots of comments dismissing this out of hand because of lack of evidence, but there aren’t any conventional treatments that are very helpful for Alzheimer’s.
These are harmless until they become harmful. What if we develop a good cure for Alzheimer's in 10 years, this method gets debunked but the method makes many refuse to use the conventional treatment? That isn't a made up scenario, it happens all the time. Announcing that something is a cure without evidence is hurting people.
It would be better if the article described it as a general cognitive decline without a diagnosis of AD. A lot of symptoms we attribute to AD could very well be caused by other factors which are reversible, such as inflammation, lack of sleep, poor diet, metal toxicity, or a deficiency of CoQ-10 or Ubiquitol due to statin use.
Anecdotally, I experienced a rather severe cognitive impairment after statin use, which, when discontinuing the statin was reversed. I believe this could be attributed to mitochondrial damage. Were I an older individual, this might be improperly diagnosed as age-related cognitive decline.
In another example, 60 Minutes ran a story on a group of people who were suffering from late-stage AD. After autopsy, some showed amyloid beta plaques in some cases and the total absence of it in others. This leads me to believe that AD, as it is currently understood, is better classified as a syndrome which may have no single definitive cure.
Sure that's possible. But it's also overweighting potential harms in an imaginary future scenario over potential benefits today. One can come up with other imaginary scenarios, not to be too dramatic, but the same arguments were likely made against Semmelweis [0] when he promoted hand washing before delivering babies, or the people who discovered the ketogenic diet helped manage epilepsy in the 1920s. [1]
Scientific progress has often been speculative and messy. The few thousand people with ApoE4 genes who read his book and then actually commit to time-restricted feeding, exercising 4 times a week, sleeping 8 hours, and semi-ketogenic diets might have better outcomes a decade from now than those who don't. If that discourages another few tens of thousands of people from taking a potential blockbuster drug in the early years after its release, fine. It's worth the natural experiment to find out because millions of people are not getting much relief from current treatments [2]. This is even more true given that Alzheimer's isn't communicable.
These are harmless until they become harmful. What if we develop a good cure for Alzheimer's in 10 years, this method gets debunked but the method makes many refuse to use the conventional treatment? That isn't a made up scenario, it happens all the time. Announcing that something is a cure without evidence is hurting people.