Time to get serious about prevention. Remove a pump handle.

Like transparency, equality and democracy in politics, prevention of disease is a motherhood and apple pie issue in medicine– everyone is in favour of it, so long as it doesn’t involve actually doing anything as committed as mounting a serious public health programme or spending millions on research. This truism takes on a new urgency […]

Alzheimer’s: we want a cure but please don’t mention B vitamins

The article in today’s Daily Mail about B vitamins and Alzheimer’s is the story of the triumph of dogged scientific persistence – do read it first if you can because this blog would become impossibly long if I repeated all the details.  But behind it is another story of indifference and prejudice that is preventing […]

Alzheimer’s Funding boost 2

The second alarming event (the first was here) concerns an announcement that never happened. Two years ago a high quality randomised trial showed that taking high doses of B vitamins significantly reduced brain shrinkage in patients who were beginning to have problems with memory and general thinking. Given that Alzheimer’s is such a huge problem and […]

Alzheimer’s funding boost 1

The announcement last month (March 25th) the Alzheimer’s funding was to be doubled by 2015 is to be welcomed. But what is the money going to be spent on? Two separate developments don’t inspire confidence that it will always be the most safe and effective treatments. The first concerns the latest developments with the drug […]