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Cake day: February 11th, 2026

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  • Misleading headline. What they actually demonstrated is reversing amyloid accumulation and the cognitive deficits in a transgenic mouse whose pathology is essentially just amyloid accumulation. Calling that “reversing Alzheimer’s” treats amyloid buildup and the disease as the same thing, which is exactly the conflation the amyloid hypothesis has been criticised for over the last decade.

    Alzheimer’s in humans is amyloid + tau tangles + neuroinflammation + vascular dysfunction + actual neurodegeneration (entorhinal and hippocampal neurons dying, brain volume measurably dropping on MRI). Tau burden correlates with cognitive decline far better than amyloid does. The IBEC paper addresses one of those layers, the upstream-ish one, in a model that doesn’t reproduce most of the others. Fixing a cause in a young system before damage has accumulated is just not the same operation as fixing an established disease in an old human cortex that’s already lost the cells.

    The human translation data backs this up. Lecanemab clears plaques and slows cognitive decline by about 27% over 18 months. Donanemab clears around 76% of plaques and slows decline by ~35% in early AD. In both trials both arms still declined, treatment just declined a bit more slowly. Northwestern’s Mesulam Institute puts it bluntly: “These medications do not reverse existing disease or stop the progression.” So removing amyloid in a system that already has the full human pathology bends the curve, it doesn’t undo anything.

    What the IBEC team has here is a genuinely interesting result for the cerebrovascular angle, where BBB dysfunction and glymphatic clearance failure are upstream of plaque accumulation rather than a downstream consequence. The LRP1 transport mechanism and the multivalent ligand design are clever and well-grounded. The fair claim is “we improved amyloid clearance and rescued behavioural deficits in an amyloid-overexpressing mouse by targeting BBB transport.” That’s a real contribution. “Reversed Alzheimer’s” sells the mechanism by overstating what it did, and it sets up the same disappointment cycle the field has been through with every other anti-amyloid intervention that worked great in mice.

    Original paper, for anyone wanting the actual data: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-025-02426-1




  • obelisk_complex@piefed.catoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comforeign policy
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    5 days ago

    Cool story. North Korea is so dystopian they put out a film called “A Day In The Life”: https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/47357-noord-korea-een-dag-uit-het-leven

    And, even though this is their “best foot forward”, it makes the whole country look like what the rest of us would consider a goddamn prison camp. The stories about North Korea are insane, but they are accurate.

    but I feel like what the 박연미 types are saying are either exaggerated or false, as the south and US think tanks pays them to come up with the most insane story

    Only an idiot would shill for brutal dictatorships like this, ignoring all available evidence in favour of their feelings. Congratulations, you’re a Donald Trump voter.


  • I’m so fucking confused, man. I’m a tech guy. I’ve spent my whole life getting good with computers, I know very little about cars, and I just can’t keep up. I’ve heard that yeah ethanol is bad but put in your tank what the manual says because if your engine isn’t designed for “high-octane” fuel (???) you’ll damage your car with the pure stuff? But I know how ethanol dries out rubber, which I’m quite sure is what my fuel lines are made of, but my manual says to use 85. So should I be using 87 and avoiding 85? Or…?

    I just want an electric car. “Plug it in”, I get.










  • Don’t get me wrong, suggestions are appreciated, but you’re answer is absolutely typical of a Stack overflow “huhuh well don’t do it wrong then” comment. You could have, for example, said you don’t use Synapse but this is why you like Continuwuity. (edit: not prescribing speech, giving an example of how your comment could have read better)

    As well, I take issue with the idea that people can only ask for help in sanctioned forums. This is a self-hosting community, after all; I am here not only to learn but to share what I learn, which I thought was the whole point.