Sixteen years and what do you get? A bunch of bad research and deeper in debt.

From Ruining It For Everyone by Zvi Mowshowitz.  This just builds on my earlier post that the longstanding recommendation to take Vitamin D supplements was not based on any rigorous research and that new research suggests there is no benefit from Vitamin D supplements for the general population.  

The revelation here is much deeper and more far reaching.  It appears that 16 years of Alzheimer's research has been misdirected owing to obvious frauds and false reporting in the original research.  

Remember that super-expensive ($56k/dose) Alzheimer’s drug that got approved by the FDA because it fights “amyloid plaques” in the brain but without any evidence that it, ya know, helps with the progression of Alzheimer’s?

And how drugs for Alzheimer’s keep not, what’s the word for it, working?

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

…

In 2006, Nature published a paper titled “A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory.”

…

The results of the study seemed to demonstrate the amyloids-to-Alzheimer’s pipeline with a clarity that even the most casual reader could understand, and it became one of—if not the most—influential papers in all of Alzheimer’s research. Not only has it been cited hundreds of times in other work, roughly 100 out of the 130 Alzheimer’s drugs now working their way through trials are directly designed to attack the kind of amyloids featured in this paper. Both Ashe and Lesné became neuroscience rock stars, the leaders of a wave based on their 2006 paper.

What intrigued Schrag when he came back to this seminal work were the images. Images in the paper that were supposed to show the relationship between memory issues and the presence of Aβ*56 appeared to have been altered. Some of them appeared to have been pieced together from multiple images. Schrag shied away from actually accusing this foundational paper of being a “fraud,” but he definitely raised “red flags.” He raised those concerns, discreetly at first, in a letter sent directly to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Only when that letter failed to generate a response did Schrag bring his suspicions to others.

Now Science has concluded its own six-month review, during which it consulted with image experts. What they found seems to confirm Schrag’s suspicions.

“They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.”

After reviewing the images, molecular biologist Elisabeth Bik said of the paper, “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Should this fraud turn out to be as extensive as it appears at first glance, the implications go well beyond just misdirecting tens of billions in funding and millions of hours of research over the last two decades. Since that 2006 publication, the presence or absence of this specific amyloid has often been treated as diagnostic of Alzheimer’s.

This does not seem, if this report is accurate - and I saw no pushback that it wasn’t - like a ‘Theranos level fraud.’ It seems much, much bigger than that.

Once again this also confirms the principle of obvious fraud. Whenever fraud is caught or revealed, it turns out to be very simple, very dumb, and remarkably easy to spot once you look. In this case, ‘shockingly blatant’ image tampering, and simple ‘dissolve the data that isn’t giving the result we wanted and appoint a new one.’

This would be akin to a construction firm erecting a major building with only a cursory check of the foundational geology.  Sixteen years of Alzheimers' researchers went chasing off after solutions without even checking that the original research was even valid.  

There was an original research study, bedecked with red-flags.  Everyone celebrated the study and ignored the red-flags and then spent sixteen years investigating the wrong things.  

The original reporting seems to be from Daily Kos, Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives by Mark Sumner.  It is the beginning of the news cycle.  Maybe Sumner is wrong.  But several reputable researchers seem like they believe there is a real thing here.  Real and bad.  

Multi-decadal recommendation on vitamin supplements with no underpinning research to support it and then a two decade long fraud that misdirects an entire field of research and dozens or hundred of researchers into wrong areas of investigation for at least sixteen years and at the cost of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

And it all passed before out universities, our national medical agencies, all the peer review literature and no one ever noticed or was willing to speak out.  The foundations for being an "expert" and for belonging to the meritocratic class seem to be getting more and more tenuous.