Tag: Cornelia Stolze

Food for Thought: “Forget Alzheimer’s”? – A Book Review

“Forget Alzheimer’s” is the title and the message of a book by German journalist Cornelia Stolze who is claiming to tell the “truth about a disease which isn’t one” (Cornelia Stolze, Vergiss Alzheimer. Die Wahrheit über eine Krankheit, die keine ist, Köln/Cologne 2011: Kiepenheuer & Witsch).

The book is strongly criticizing the handling of dementia, in particular Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in today’s medicine, pointing out the lack of adequate diagnostics and therapies and contrasting this sad reality with the often exaggerated promises of imminent breakthroughs by experts.

Stolze starts by explaining that to date, it is extremely difficult to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Most claims about new methods to confirm a diagnosis or, even better, to predict the onset have turned out to be false. She also points out that about 50 diseases and at least 150 medications may cause dementia symptoms. She concludes that most physicians are overextended to differentiate and often too early and too easily put the patient down as having Alzheimer’s, thereby impeding a causal treatment and condemning the patient to unnecessary mental derangement.

Examples are cognitive impairments associated with dehydration and depression, but also a variety of drugs, in particular, if patients take cocktails of drugs prescribed by different specialists who neglected potential interactions and side effects. Complications during surgery or anesthesia, too, can cause dementia symptoms. Stolze summarizes that about 75% of all dementia diagnoses are false.

She also points out that most medications on the market for the treatment of AD are ineffective, do not provide causal therapy and may at best slow down disease progression for a limited period of time.

These chapters are a strength of the book and can be read as a roll call to relatives, patient advocacy groups and the health care system in general to raise awareness about the various forms of dementia and to demand better diagnosis and better drugs.

Stolze then tells the 1970s story of how Alzheimer’s disease was put on the agenda of the then newly founded US National Institute on Aging (NIA). Back then, little was known about Alzheimer’s disease, but using a fancy name describing a threatening disease was way more efficient in raising awareness and money from governments and private sponsors than by talking in general terms about senility or dementia.

Subsequently, Stolze’s story gets astray as she tries to convince the reader that AD has been and still is a mere invention by the medical industry, and that every scientific description of the disease – whether in terms of pathology, biochemistry or cellular and molecular biology – is full of errors, inconsistencies and contradictions.

The author makes no efforts to go into the details to substantiate this claim. As an example, Stolze writes that plaques – long viewed as the hallmarks of AD – can be found in the brains of mentally wide awake elderly as well. She ignores that this fact has puzzled researchers since long and that there is an explanation to it already: plaques in the brain of healthy people do have a different molecular composition than those in people with AD, in which they predominantly consist of a certain, very toxic variant of the A beta peptide. The details have been elucidated by researchers from the German biotech company Probiodrug, with the first publications appearing in the late 1990s. The hypothesis meanwhile has been confirmed independently by various research groups around the world and a first drug addressing the underlying mechanism already has reached clinical stage.

Moreover, Stolze completely ignores that there are inherited forms of AD such as Familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD) or Early Onset Familial Alzheimer’s disease (EOFAD), uncommon forms of Alzheimer’s disease which usually strike quite early in life. They are inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion and the genes involved have been characterized years ago. Moreover, studies in these inherited forms have revealed further details of the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in AD in general.

Further parts of the book deal with selected German Alzheimer specialists and their connections to industry and politics, raising questions about conflict of interest disclosures. This is an ongoing debate in medicine in general, and Stolze seems to share the widely held beliefs in Germany that a researcher or medical doctor, who files for a patent, already has crossed the line to unethical behavior.

Most regrettable about the book is that it shakes the confidence in medicine of patients, relatives and people involved in the care of dementia patients without providing any valuable guidance what to do and whom to trust if a loved one is showing signs of confusion, disorientation or loss of memory.


Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Dieter Durand and Susanne Kutter in Wirtschaftswoche feature a disputation between Alzheimer-researcher Konrad Beyreuther and author Cornelia Stolze, who has written a book claiming Alzheimer’s disease does not exist as an exactly defined disease.

While Beyreuther maintains the disease is real and can be clinically separated from other forms of dementia, he concedes that current medications are useless and that diagnosis often is inadequate. Stolze in her book “Vergiss Alzheimer” (“Forget About Alzheimer’s”) states that patients with signs of dementia often are labeled as Alzheimer’s disease patients although they are not, that they receive useless medications, that the real causes of their respective dementias, such as diabetes, depression, stroke, or dehydration, are overlooked and not treated, and that medical doctors make money with unreliable early diagnostic tests. A review of the book is to follow soon – please regularly check the akampioneer.

Joachim Müller-Jung in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) comments on a proposal by several US stem cell researchers in the “Cell Stem Cell” journal. The manifesto calls for establishing a market for human donor egg cells so that scientists can use these cells for cloning experiments. While the purpose is not cloning humans but generating pluripotent human stem cells, Müller-Jung warns that the push will once again put the “cloning humans” debate on the table – a discussion he thinks is needed like a hole in the head. He states there are plenty of experiments already demonstrating that sooner or later it will be possible to generate pluripotent human stem cells for regenerative medicine by reprogramming human body cells.

Martina Lenzen-Schulte, also in FAZ, features the first attempts to use the mirror neuron concept for clinical purposes, e.g. for the rehabilitation of stroke patients to support regain of movement control.

Hildegard Kaulen in FAZ reminds her readers that a substantial part of the research crowned by nobel prizes never received third-party funds. She expresses sympathy with the proposal put forward in “Nature” by Stanford University’s John Ioannidis to either allocate research grants by lottery, by dividing up the money so that each applicant receives the same amount, or simply by handing out money to outstanding scientists with the only specification to use it for research. He criticizes that it has never been investigated which method to allocate research grants is the best and that the current practice consumes too much valuable time that should be spent more creatively on research.

Die Welt reports in a feature by dpa on material scientists of the Technical University Dresden who use wood for pipes that are as strong and resilient as pipes made from concrete. Wood is cut to rectangular blocks, which are heated to 140°C and compressed. Subsequently, all air – which amounts to up to two third of the wood’s volume –  is removed. The resulting panels are then bonded and formed by applying steam. The team led by Peer Haller of the university’s Institute for Steel and Wood Construction calculates that a post carrying 50 tons of weight needs 155 kg of steel but only 28 kg of wood treated with the new procedure.

Katrin Blawat in Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) reports that Umckaloabo, an alcoholic extract of Pelargonium sidoides roots, is under investigation by Germany’s Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM). The medication, which is sold as OTC in Germany for the treatment of acute bronchitis (with annual sales of about € 40 million), is suspected to cause inflammation of the liver, with six cases reported in 2011.

The New York Times (NYT) this week deals in-depth with the recommendation of the United States Preventive Services Task Force that men no longer should have an annual prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. Gardiner Harris interviewed the experts involved in reviewing PSA testing, citing Dr. Roger Chou, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Oregon, as saying “the idea that knowing you have a cancer isn’t always a good thing is a very difficult concept for many people.” Chou states that the vast majority of men who have prostate cancer will never be bothered by it. Urologists however view the issue differently, stating the task force chose to focus on the wrong studies and it was wrong to throw PSA testing away.

Last not least, in preparation of the coming common cold season, Ulrike Gebhard in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) explains that men suffer from the common cold more often than women. Reason is – according to researchers from Belgian Gent University – that women often carry extra portions of genes from the toll-like receptor (TLR) gene family. As a result, they produce more of the so-called miRNA molecules that support the body in fending off viral infections. The downside of women’s more powerful immune system is increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases and a more violent reaction to certain vaccines.