12d • General discussion
We've Been Treating Alzheimer's All Wrong
A paper published recently said what I've been thinking for 15 years:
We've been treating Alzheimer's as one disease. It's not.
It's a tangled mix of biology, aging, inflammation, vascular damage, metabolic dysfunction, and genetics. All converging differently in every patient.
That's why drugs targeting a single mechanism keep falling short.
Lecanemab slows decline modestly in some patients. Donanemab shows similar results. Both target amyloid. Both cost over $26,000 per year. Both carry significant side effects including brain edema and swelling.
And for most patients, the improvement is so modest that families can't tell the difference in daily life.
I've spent my career at the intersection of clinical practice and technology.
Here's what I believe:
The future of Alzheimer's treatment isn't one drug. It's a combination approach.
Metabolic optimization (blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar)
↳ Targeted anti-inflammatory therapies
↳ Amyloid reduction for the right patients at the right time
↳ Lifestyle intervention as medicine, not afterthought
↳ Technology that identifies patients earlier and monitors them continuously
This is exactly why I built tools for clinical workflow automation. Because the complexity of managing multiple interventions across a large patient population can't rely on human memory and manual tracking.
The practices I work with that are closing care gaps at scale are doing something the pharmaceutical industry hasn't figured out:
They're treating the whole patient, not just the pathology.
And the infrastructure to do that efficiently didn't exist until we built it.
💬 Do you think the pharmaceutical approach to Alzheimer's is working?
Citation: Yoo J., Multi-target-directed therapeutic strategies for Alzheimer’s disease: controlling amyloid-β aggregation, metal ion homeostasis, and enzyme inhibition, Chemical Science, 2025.
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We've Been Treating Alzheimer's All Wrong
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