I don't have a big investment in SAVA, but I will up my shares now. I do think it works, for the right selection of people. I have actually seen in improvement in my mother, with just improved nutrition, exercise, and more exposure to more people. We have a great part time caregiver who is really helping us.
My mom is 101 years old. She walks like an 80 year old.
Lately, she asks pertinent questions (!!!), recognizes people, and laughs sometimes.
I can see why the placebo group is a problem. We are just adding various herbs and vitamins, and we have a caregiver who loves to cook. She makes a smoothie that we toss a bucket of supplements in, and she has been making sauteed salmon every day for lunch (lots of Omega 3 fatty acid).
I believe my mother would be dead if we had put her in a home, it has been a long road, but she is much more cooperative and does more for herself than she did a year ago. She also stopped beating up on us.
I am hopeful for SAVA and for the AVXL drug. We have a 70 year old friend who has just been diagnosed, and I am trying to get her to go to Europe to get a neurologist so that she can get the AVXL drug as soon as it is approved there.
I would never advise anyone to use the monoclonal antibodies that remove tau. The long term brain shrinkage would be devastating. I do not know if anyone has seen the recent studies debunking the Tau theory. We need to get these other drugs out on the streets. One thing in AVXL favor is that they have had much larger trials, I think, than SAVA. It is important to get the statistics on your side. We are not gonna see a significant percent improvement in a small short-duration trial. Alzheimer doesn't work that way. Patients get better for a while for unknown reasons, or maybe for just a lot of smoothies every day. We aren't putting people in a totally controlled environment.
Meantime, I walk a million miles a day, eat my protein, take my Omega 3, etc, etc. Unless I forget. (So funny, if you don't use it you really do lose it. Tried proving some trigonometric identities, which I loved to do in high school. I had to do a review before I could function. Hey it was 50 years ago. I can still remember calculus though, a few years later, plus I used it a lot at work.) I was trying to calculate the angles on various pieces of wood for a construction project. It was pretty darned sad!!
I thank Immunomedics for keeping me up to par on organic chemistry. I actually learned a lot of new stuff that I couldn't have learned in grad school years ago.
But the science of Alzheimers and other brain disfunction is pretty challenging compared to what we learned about cancer research. |
