Keyser Söze said:
Those are some links worth checking out. I will get to them later on today.
Progress on drugs that would really impact neural degeneration or indeed even encourage and promote regeneration has been really slow/non existent. Alzheimers drugs, and there have been many attempts by some determined, well funded, and bright people, haven't had significant palliative, preventive, or curative effects for extended periods.
Good news is that I'm 32, and new classes of drugs to treat alz and similar will likely be invented, tested on human gineau pigs and early users, and available by the time I start crapping myself. It would also be nice to have a depression treatment based on my portable miniature MRI wand, but SNRIs are suitable for now.
Progress has been slow/non existent in the large dose nutraceutical approach because...Big Fuckin Drumroll please....Big Pharma and the rest of the drug companies have no way to secure patent protection over Uridine, a nucleoside abundant in foods. Sure they are trying to patent tri-acetyl uridine, which is way more expensive under patent protection and marketed as the more bioavailable form of Uridine. Why would anyone buy that at an outrageous brand named drug price, when you can get good old Uridine-5-monophospate at cut rate prices. Choline (which has been around for ever)is sold dirt cheap in supplements, and cheaply soy lecithin.
One pharma company has been marketing a pure form of EPA as the ethyl ester because they were able to obtain patent protection by adding the ethyl group to EPA, essentially turning e-EPA into nothing more than a pro-drug for EPA. What wonderful patent laws we have.
Despite the fact that these combinations are showing extremely promising results in early stage trials, they are not being moved onward toward later stage human testing for one reason, absolutely regardless of the extreme promise they show, versus other drugs in the alzheimers pipeline and it is absolutely child's play to figure out why. Those hucksters do not give a shit if they can stop suffering, I mean they only make medicines to heal us. Sure they will, as long as CRAZY profit margins are in it for them.
Sure the people in that absolutely shitty article you linked in the NYT have financial links to the companies that make these supplements. I never read about brain science in mainstream media as they give you a sensationalist view of
Who the hell do you think is funding the science that downplays this remedy or shows it to be less effective than SSRIs(also one of the biggest clinical trial shams in history. Since we rely of private drug companies to run clinical trials, there is absolutely now reason for them to test a combination like this in the time period
They can't do this with things they didn't invent, so when things that have been around for a while turn out to have great new uses, the drug companies barely profit. Novel combinations such as the EPA/DHA,Uridine, choline combination, are given trials against proven drugs that work in shorter time frames than the the UMP/DHA/Choline would be expected to work.
Basically those companies throw their financial muscle around to quash competition where there is no money to be made off of it.
Keyser I would like see the studies showing evidence that serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are benefical in Alzheimers. Do they just mask symptoms or actually slow progression, which is the treatment we really want to aim for. This almost sounds like the not quite so recent trend of giving anti-psychotics to the elderly and those suffering dementa.
