alt Hacker News> “We have no cure. I don’t want to know.”
> If astronomers announced that a large asteroid might strike Earth in twenty years, and that we currently had no way to deflect it, nobody would respond by saying, “Come back when you already have the rocket.”
I don’t think the analogy fits, for a couple reasons.
1. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is because of the fear of a fate worse than death — living with Alzheimer’s.
2. People not wanting to know whether they have Alzheimer’s is not the same was not wanting a way to detect it. As you said, being able to measure it may help lead to a cure/treatment. I doubt people are against improving detection — they may just not want the detection to be applied personally.
Cure is the wrong word. Alzheimer’s can be best described as a failure of a system and "debris" accumulates faster than it can be "cleared". There are many moving parts and everyone is unique about the cause of their system failure.
Wrote up my current systems understanding here https://metamagic.substack.com/p/the-alzheimers-equation, but it makes clear why treatments that target only one variable are mathematically doomed to fail to work on everyone and why there will never be a single "cure". It explains without needing to read 10,000 papers why we keep getting research talking about treatment X helps in some, but not all cases or symptom Y is associated in some, but not all, etc.