ost people have a recurring nightmare. Here's mine: I'm in Rockville,
Maryland, walking past the FDA building. Suddenly two guys come out
carrying a giant rubber stamp and start chasing me down Parklawn Drive,
trying to approve me as a treatment against late-onset Alzheimer's disease.
I wake up in a sweat.
Thank goodness, it's just a dream. But their approval last week of Lecanemab, an antibody against beta-amyloid, is actually good news: we finally know for sure that at least there is one thing—beta-amyloid—that doesn't cause Alzheimer's.
So what does? Everything! Too much sleep, not enough sleep, obesity, weight loss in middle age, cardiovascular disease, head trauma, HSV1, HHV6, PM2.5, diesel exhaust, air pollution, blue-green algae, old age, gingivitis, inflammation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, high-fat diet, lack of exercise, PTSD, and now Covid-19. There's also picking your nose, but that's not a cause, but a delivery mechanism.
This might sound like chaos, but it really is good news. It's following the four step pattern that signifies creativity in any intellectual endeavor:
It starts out simple. A simple solution is selected and becomes dogma.
Evidence accumulates showing that the simple solution is wrong.
Other solutions are proposed. The field gets mind-bogglingly complex.
A new understanding integrating the solutions emerges from the complexity.
Thomas Kuhn talked about paradigm change. As the old ideas become untenable, scientists are forced to invent new less-untenable ideas and a different, slightly-less-false paradigm takes its place. This, said Kuhn, is how science progresses. But that theory oversimplifies the process. We need a new paradigm of how paradigms change in science.
Changing a paradigm requires two factors: a need to understand the fundamental truth and an establishment that enforces the current dogma by obstructing the path to understanding. The establishment plays an important role by turning a gradual change into a revolution.
We need to treat doubts and questions from skeptics as legitimate. In every case it was establishment intransigence, not the doubters, however misinformed they appeared to be, that caused the revolution.
The complexity of the Ptolemaic cycle model of astronomy, which was endorsed by the Church, drove the acceptance of the current model in astronomy. Medieval alchemists, the anti-vaxxers of their day, led to modern chemistry by overthrowing Aristotle's four-element theory. By Mendeleev's time, 63 elements and no isotopes were known. Now the Table of Isotopes comes on a CD-ROM and we know of 118 elements up to 294Og (organesson-294) and over 3000 isotopes. Particle physicists regard the current particle physics model we live with today as too complicated. Depending on how you count, there are either 9, 12, 17, 26, 31, 36, or 37 fundamental particles. Or maybe there are no particles at all, only wave packets. This sort of thing happens so often that physicists now use simplicity as a criterion for a successful theory.
It's not confined to science, but a general process. Computer languages like C++ follow a similar pattern: born in simplicity, they grow in complexity until programmers despair of ever understanding them, and are replaced by—in the case of C++—Java, C#, or maybe the appropriately named Rust.
California Proposition 65 warning on a container of cement
In cancer research, the long period of dogma that cancer was caused by environmental toxins led to an astronomical number of chemicals including alcohol, caffeine, saccharine, cement, and even titanium dioxide being declared as carcinogens. This finally gave way to a more mature understanding of how cells turn cancerous, but the old dogma still persists. We still must deal with those Prop 65 labels on almost every product—which defeat their own purpose by being ignored by almost everyone.
It even creates friction between different fields. Even today, any Alzheimer treatment that encouraged growth and repair of neurons or synapses is immediately shot down by the FDA and by cancer researchers, who regard anything that induces growth as a tumor promoter.
Covid-19 increases the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD)
The idea that Covid causes AD started with a bombshell article in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease by a group of researchers at Case Western Reserve University, who studied 6,245,282 patients over 65 years of age and found that people with Covid-19 were at significantly increased risk for new diagnosis of AD within one year of a Covid-19 diagnosis, with a hazard ratio of 1.69.
The authors suggested inflammation as a cause, which is consistent with their finding that the hazard ratio was even higher (1.82) for women. A follow-up paper in the same journal by Ruth F. Itzhaki postulated that the effect could be due to the ability of Covid-19 to reactivate latent HSV1, which is known to infect 80% of the population by age 60 and remains in the body for life.
This is no fringe conspiracy theory. The National Institutes of Health has a Program Announcement soliciting grant applications on the topic of viral and bacterial infections as a cause of AD.
So what about the Covid vax? It contains a messenger RNA that forces prolonged expression of the identical toxic protein that causes the damage in Covid. In some ways, it's almost an artificial virus. Both the vax and the virus exist to manufacture large amounts of the toxic spike protein in your body. The difference is that only the virus is transmissible through the air, though industry scientists are no doubt working feverishly to change that.
There's no suggestion so far that the mRNA vaccine causes Alzheimer's. It's believed that the vax doesn't harm as many people as Covid because its tropism is lower than a real virus. The general opinion seems to be that disruption of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is required for viral entry into the CNS. Although the spike protein can disrupt BBB integrity, it has not yet been established whether the isolated spike protein can cross the BBB and enter the human brain. The closest study so far is an in vitro study that found that S1, which is released from Spike protein by enzymatic cleavage, crosses an artificial model of the BBB. More research is needed on this topic.
After I was forced to take the vax to stay employed, my blood pressure monitor started crashing repeatedly because it couldn't get a stable pulse. It's ‘anxiety,’ my health care provider told me. Who knew anxiety was so powerful? Those guys are good: they can diagnose it without even looking at you. So far I haven't had the death, which is a classic symptom of anxiety. But maybe that's the next stage.
jan 13 2023, 5:39 am. updated jan 13 2023, 5:56 pm
