A breakthrough

Back on October 21, 2016, my blogpost topic was titled “A means to slow Alzheimer’s?” Some days earlier, I had seen an article by Damian Garde, who writes for the STAT news service, which covers

Alzheimer’s and 0ther neurological disorders. I was a bit tardy to understand the implications. As Garde noted at the time, a “secondary analysis of pooled data showed a 34 percent reduction in the patients’ cognitive decline.” But things didn’t go to fruition. And for the next couple of years, little progress was made in detecting  maddening Alzheimer’s secrets. My next sentence was an understatement: “This finding could be significant”—a sign that in 2016 my understanding of my disease was still rather shallow.

And then the breakthrough was revealed: Alzheimer’s gave up one of its cherished secrets. And it was Biogen, in Cambridge, which performed the alchemy, just after the 4th of July.

What does this mean for me and my cohorts? It’s complicated. My six-plus years of living with early-onset Alzheimer’s has brought me to the end of the first phase of the disease, and into the early-middle stage. In a statement, the company stated, “Biogen is declaring success with a once-failed treatment with for Alzheimer’s disease, pointing to positive secondary results in hopes of saving a drug that many had written off entirely.”

For those of us who are living with the disease, there are still Just organizing the far-flung clinical trials will be a vast organizing project. And, sadly, vast legions of people with Alzheimer’s too far down the Alzheimer’s path to qualify for the clinical trials. I myself am in good physical health, as I approach my 57th birthday. But I have a different concern: I may not be able to withstand the dosage to break up the amyloid plaque, which in recent years has emerged as the key aspect of Alzheimer’s disease.

As a high school football player and wrestler, I had a reputation for my toughness. The difference here is that I would be the passive object, worried that I wouldn’t be able to absorb the full strength of the dosage. Am I being irrational? It’s not like we are starting the clinical trials immediately. But in a-worst-case scenario, I could end up with brain inflammation, and leave me much more worse than I am now. Should I trust the odds? First of all, I want to know the odds.

The clinical trials are expected to last for two years on multiple continents. I invite my readers to contact me on this topic, at mitch.evich@gmail.com