A short excerpt from a June 5, 2024 YouTube conversation about Alzheimer's disease, focusing on the ethics and practical implications of early diagnosis. Speakers discuss whether people would want to know they will develop early-onset Alzheimer's, and argue that early diagnostics create targets that incentivize pharmaceutical development of therapies (e.g., plaque removal, vascular rescue).
Chapters
And it's funny because there's also the internal problem. If we saw it and we knew we're 20 years old, we know we're going to develop Alzheimer's at early onset or something like that. Be scary. Would you want to know? I think that the point is that's how diseases are cured. So it's not just about you having it and knowing about it and can't do anything about it. It's when you have it and you know about it and you can't do anything about it that drug companies start doing something about it because hey, now they have a target. They want to eliminate that plaque in your brain. Oh, they want to rescue your vascular physiology, make you have the healthy blood vessels like a 20 year old. That's the kind of stuff that is needed. So that when we do develop new drugs, while it may not be immediately available because the diagnostics come out before the therapeutics, it's what is the key enabling factor for those therapies, at least.
To the cascade effect of creating the thing that's necessary to actually solve the problem. Fundamental.