alt Hacker NewsI wonder if there are multiple causes of Alzheimer’s, and the variability in outcome is due to the fact that the treatment only is fixing one root cause.
That said, if it turns out that a treatment for some Alzheimer’s is some kind of “brain fluid” dialysis, it would be an amazing breakthrough.
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> some kind of “brain fluid” dialysis
i think fixing the plumbing there may be a treatment for a bunch of issues given that for example the whole volume of the cerebrospinal fluid is normally refreshed 3-4 times a day (imagine changing oil in your car engine 3-4 times a day :) - i.e. any hiccup in the plumbing (even a temporarily one and even in the healthy people like a bad sleeping position) and you already may get headache, etc. One can imagine that any chronic performance degradation of the plumbing may lead to a bunch of issues (similar to say what happens in any other organ/limb when blood or lymphatic flow is degraded)
Specifically for Alzheimer's - we do know about direct importance of that plumbing system here - poor sleep is well correlated with Alzheimer's as during deep slow-wave sleep, the brain's glymphatic system actively washes away metabolic waste and toxic proteins, including Alzheimer-related plaques while chronic sleep deprivation increases the buildup of toxic brain proteins like amyloid-beta and tau.
That Alzheimer's surgery brings up another very important and pretty fascinating aspect - not only the Alzheier's may be not permanently damaging the brain, we may speculate that various things we observe as age related brain degradation may be not actual brain cells/core degradation and instead similarly fixable issues of just some utilitarian subsystems.
Probably
Most conditions are like that, particularly ones where the underlying cause is poorly understood. We see symptoms that lookalike and assume they all point to the same thing