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
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