WHAT should we make of stories and TV footage this week claiming that Alzheimer’s patients “woke up” and became compos mentis within minutes of being injected in the neck with the anti-arthritis drug etanercept?
Unusually, the treatment doesn’t target the protein plaques which clog up the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and are believed to destroy brain tissue. Instead, the aim is to ease brain inflammation, which Edward Tobinick, pioneer of the new treatment at the Institute for Neurological Research in California, thinks is the real cause. He argues that inflammation blocks signalling between brain cells, and that is why getting rid of it has such…
