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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer’s disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn’t even clickbait.
On a human level, the only cure for Alzheimers is prevention. It can’t possibly be reversed. I say this because if you are reading this, you may have a loved one with Alzheimer’s and unfortunately the world is rife with hopeful myths and predatory personalities.
Imagine your brain is a computer. What this treatment apparently did was repair a severely damaged computer back to working order. Some parts of the computer either work or don’t work, so these newly repaired pieces can be considered totally repaired, or the damage “reversed.” However, some parts are impossible to recover. The severely damaged hard drive may be repaired to such a state that it is usable again, but the data which was contained on it before it was destroyed can’t be restored without time travel.
The higher brain functions we take for granted as humans, such as recounting and integrating our experiences, are beyond a brain being able to function or not. It matters a great deal to us and our identites what was stored in them.
If this treatment works perfectly, which I hope it will, it could restore function but can’t restore everything that person was before their severe brain damage. That’s the fantasy people generally want for their loved ones but it can’t be.
Please care for your loved ones as they are.
I agree with your sentiment, but the notion that information in the brain is comparable to binary bits on a scratched CD isn’t really accurate either. Even severely damaged brains have been shown to be able to recover both functions and memories, and it’s unclear exactly how things like individual memories are encoded – or whether encoding is even the right way of thinking about it at all.
That aside, even if some loss is irretrievable, I’d vastly prefer to be left with 80% of myself than 0% of myself.
There are so many misconceptions about the brain and Alzheimer’s that I made my comment as public-facing as possible to address the incorrect but common belief that someone can go from having moderate to severe Alzheimer’s to going back to how they were before. I agree that this would be a breakthrough, but it should not be considered in place of actively taking preventative measures and taking warning signs seriously before there is a serious problem. I have found that Alzheimer’s is a subject so uncomfortable that in effect the average person would only want to think about it after it becomes a problem. The idea that it can be fully reversed may cause some people to be less likely to consider it before it becomes a problem.
As for the details of the brain, it’s still very mysterious and mainly we’ve learned how far beyond our comprehension really understanding the details of how it works can be. Having cared for hundreds of individuals suffering from dementia, mostly being cases of Alzheimer’s, it is very true that hippocampus damage is not the same as losing memories. In many cases I have observed that an old memory may not exactly be lost, but the access to the memory becomes lost until some other pathway is activated which causes that memory to become accessible. Restoring this kind of brain functionality could, as you say, re-create the connections to these memories and other info.
The most common damage of Alzheimer’s on average is Hippocampus damage. The Hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for recording and storing memories. This means that depending on the extent of the damage to the Hippocampus the individual may be unlikely to form almost any new memories at all (typical of my guests, unfortunately). While the memories formed by a healthy hippocampus may still be accessible, the memories a damaged hippocampus didn’t record will never become accessible because they were never recorded. I agree I would still want to come back 80%, but it would be extremely jarring to have new concrete memories when my last ones were from decades ago.
This is aside from the total unpredictability as to how a newly recovered cortex may be different in myriad ways from the cortex which was destroyed. This is an area we don’t have human evidence on to my knowledge. Much better in my opinion to catch it as early as possible and prevent it than to suffer the consequences of the comfort of avoiding the topic since the assumption is it can be totally recovered from. Once again, this research is encouraging and I hope it eventually puts me out of a job. I only say this to encourage the better path for people with only a causal knowledge of these subjects.
Of course, medical reversal of Alzheimer’s is not the same as reversing the brain damage that was already caused by it. Its more like they’ve potentially identified a way of stopping the bleeding, depending on how transferable this or a similar method is to humans.