Discarding Behavioral Testing - Recommendations of the NIH NIA Alzheimer's Disease Research Summit 2015

[holly_brothers]

On May 8th, the NIA release the recommendations of 60 experts on the Path to Treatment and Prevention of Alzheimer’s disease. The recommendations are listed here http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/recommendations-nih-ad-research-summit-2015.

I am very concerned about one particular recommendation from SESSION ONE: Interdisciplinary Research to Understand the Heterogeneity and Multifactorial Etiology of Disease. This recommendation states, “Accept the limitations of rodent animal models and divest from using behavioral endpoints as measures of therapeutic efficacy in favor of biochemical and physiological endpoints”.

The problem is, most transgenic models of Alzheimer’s do not faithfully reflect the cognitive deficits characteristic of Alzheimer’s. The field is good at adding Aß to mice and then removing Aß from those mice, but that hasn’t translated into any clinical progress. It seems that the problem is in the model; we need to seek models that better reproduce clinical symptoms. If drugs reduce behavioral pathology in mice, then this might filter what goes to clinical trial in a more optimal way.

What are your thoughts? Am I misinterpreting this?