we are headed for an epidemic of dementia that threatens to overwhelm our health care system.

Repubs. Yeah. It's true.
I think they need to go back and get the Frothy Mix to donate more.

and do not really think dementia equals crazy.....

While I agree with your conclusion, the medical and legal definition;

insanity n. 1) mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. Insanity is distinguished from low intelligence or mental deficiency due to age or injury

Does fit the legal part of many states' definition of insanity. As to the medical definition, again, it does fit at least the symptoms of 'insanity.' The NIH suggests there should be further studies and determinations as to whether this should be so considered a mental illness;

"Dementia's departure from mental illness reflects psychiatry's continuing marginalization within medicine on an outdated mind/body or illness/disease split. This underlines one of the psychiatrist's roles as the vehicle to 'medically' explain abnormal behaviour. This model means that behaviour, once explained in terms of disease as opposed to illness, can be moved from the direct responsibility of psychiatry into other areas of medicine. Paradoxically, this suggests that the future of psychiatry will be in a completely different direction from its current biological focus."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11990881

This article is from 2001 and reflects the inclusion of facts within DSM IV. I do not have access as to whether the soon to be released DSM V will so recognize the fact that the two may be related and/or one in the same.

Sooner or later ya gotta laugh through the pain.

If they actually found a cure, they would keep it off the market so they could continue selling drugs to "treat" the disease for billion after billion.

Curing diseases is a non starter.....

when is the last time they cured anything?

but it's never carried over to humans... I hope that this leads to something useful for people, not just the poor mice they're giving these dreadful diseases to.

I like seeing these sorts of things but the excitement does not even start until the human clinical trials are underway.

Then why are some cancers considered curable? I can't name the specific ones, but I do know that some people claim to "be cancer-free" for x number of years.

Surely that came about as a result of research that was done on mice, no?

Not all cancer is the same. Some are difficult if not impossible to "cure" but that doesn't mean all are.

But, like some of the posters above have said, the medical industrial complex is going to extract their pound of flesh. A mother recently told Santorum that her child had a rare genetic illness that was being treated with a drug that costs a million dollars a year. Santorum praised the pharmacological industry, saying they had a right to set prices according to market forces. Just what you'd expect from the callous bastard. But, a million dollars a year? I'm trying to understand their rationale. They find a cure for cancers and other terminal illnesses, which will cut off their drugs to extend their lives, so they figure the drugs that will cure their illnesses should be as financially exorbitant as possible. Remember the horse pills veterinarians used to kill worms that only costs $3 each, then skyrocketed to over hundreds of dollars after it was discovered that it was effective for some kind of human illness? What was it? Anyone?

doesn't mean it can't come back.
cancer is, for the most part, nature's way of killing us off.
it's a genetic defect built into nearly all of us.
thats the problem with cancer... we're meant to get it.

Starting making some for people.....

:BWWWAAAAHHHH:

To repurpose John Steinbeck's immortal passage from "The Grapes of Wrath" about the deliberate spoilage of crops while children were starving in the name of keeping up food prices)

"And people, losing their memories, spirit, and identity to Alzheimer's, must die mentally while their bodies still live...because a profit cannot be taken from a medication".

I'd really like to be wrong...I'd like to see Big Pharma do what was right just ONCE...but it looks to me like this will end up being yet another division along class lines.

I wonder if this is the reason. He said there were a lot of really promising leads.

So it has already cleared the human safety trials. That's HUGE.

The speed with which this drug has had an effect on mice is absolutely astounding, not hyperbole at all, it is remarkable.

Alzheimer's disease is associated with impaired clearance of ?-amyloid from the brain, a process normally facilitated by apolipoprotein E (ApoE). ApoE expression is transcriptionally induced through the action of the nuclear receptors peroxisome proliferator activated receptor (PPAR? and liver X receptors (LXR) in coordination with retinoid X receptors (RXR). Oral administration of the RXR agonist, bexarotene, to a murine model of Alzheimer's disease resulted in enhanced clearance of soluble A? within hours in an apoE-dependent manner. A? plaque area was reduced >50% within just 72 hours. Furthermore, bexarotene stimulated the rapid reversal of cognitive, social, and olfactory deficits and improved neural circuit function. Thus, RXR activation stimulates physiological A? clearance mechanisms, resulting in the very rapid reversal of a broad range of A?-induced deficits.

This is wonderful news! And, as someone said earlier: this drug is already on the market. If I were an Alzheimer's patient or caregiver, I'd be asking my doctor for this drug.

There's no stopping human trials now. I'll bet there has already been a run on the available stock of it.

Man, I hope it works.

I'm assuming they did just this in the mice. They probably did it by infusing the drug, but the question then remains: how often do they need to use the drug to maintain the effect? No one wants to walk around being continuously infused.

If they can't tell us we have a pre-existing condition anymore they'll just price it out of our range. Where there's a will and money, there's always a way...

if I had Alzheimer's.

I suspect doctors are already doing it if patients who insist.

The drug, while being a cancer drug, is also used to study cholesterol metabolism via the ApoE gene. The ApoE gene is highly involved in Alzheimer's disease, so it wasn't just random chance that they chose this drug to use on this particular animal model of AD.

When I first read the headlines I also thought it must have been some sort of random luck, but it makes logical scientific sense.

In fact, here's a link to a paper discussing the use of this drug for cholesterol study. It would be really interesting if this drug not only helps AD but prevents atherosclerosis as well!

The RXR Agonist Bexarotene Improves Cholesterol Homeostasis and Inhibits Atherosclerosis Progression in a Mouse Model of Mixed Dyslipidemia

Objective— The activity of the antitumoral agent bexarotene (Targretin, Bexarotene) depends on its binding to the nuclear retinoid-X receptor (RXR) and subsequent transcriptional regulation of target genes. Through RXR activation, bexarotene may modulate numerous metabolic pathways involved in atherosclerosis. Here, we investigated the effect of bexarotene on atherosclerosis progression in a dyslipidemic murine model, the human apolipoprotein E2 knockin mouse, that develops essentially macrophage-laden lesions.

http://atvb.ahajournals.org/content/26/12/2731.long