What did those Alzheimer’s researchers lie about?
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Long story short – Researchers in the early 1990s edited images of Alzheimer’s patients brain scans. There was a suspicion at the time something called an “amyloid plaque” was forming in the brains of patients and that the presence and quantity of amyloid plaques was a factor in Alzheimer’s disease. These researched essentially photoshopped amyloid plaques into the images of patient brains to suggest they found proof of this suspicion.
In the intervening 30 years therapies and treatments targeting amyloid plaques (which are real things, in case that’s not clear) assuming that their removal would cure Alzheimer’s. 30 years of research on these treatments suggested that there was no benefit. That created an obvious confusion, how can removing the things we think cause Alzheimer’s not improve people’s medical outcomes?
That’s what led people to reexamine the original study and uncover the lies.
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