A revolutionary drug that stops Alzheimer's disease in its tracks could be available within a few years.
It could prevent people from reaching the devastating final stages of the illness, in which sufferers lose the ability to walk, talk and even swallow, and end up totally dependent on others.
The jab [injection], which is now being tested on patients, could be in widespread use in as little as six years.
Existing drugs can delay the progress of the symptoms, but their effect wears off relatively quickly, allowing the disease to take its devastating course. In contrast, the new vaccine may be able to hold the disease at bay indefinitely.
Early tests showed the vaccine is highly effective at breaking up the sticky protein that clogs the brain in Alzheimer's, destroying vital connections between brain cells.
When the jab was given to mice suffering from a disease similar to Alzheimer's, 80 per cent of the patches of amyloid protein were broken up.
The vaccine is now being tried out on 60 elderly Swedish patients in the early and middle stages of Alzheimer's. Half of the men and women are being given the vaccine while half are being given dummy jabs.
This would be an astonishing breakthrough, and we certainly hope the drug treatment works well on humans, but we have a question: We're frequently admonished that belief in Darwinian evolution has been absolutely essential for developments in modern medicine, so we'd like to know what role Darwinian belief played in the research leading to this vaccine. After all, one doesn't have to believe that we're closely related to mice to think that if a cure works on a disease in mice similar to Alzheimer's that it might also work on Alzheimer's in humans. But maybe I'm missing something.
RLC