Ya a more accurate headline might be "wealth inequality found to be major cause of Alzheimer's research failures" or "Alzheimer's research failures reveal defects in western medicine".
If the fundamental problem is misallocation of research dollars, then that's what should be tackled first. I'd vote to do something like a git bisect and isolate the failures first. The scale of the failures suggests that the problems go back to the beginning. So I'd start by halving the funds that go to the big players and distributing the remainder amongst smaller groups and individuals trying a wide array of different approaches.
That said, I'd predict that as theory and simulation improve, especially in areas like big data, machine learning and AI, strong correlations will be found soon (probably within 5 years, certainly 10). They'll probably discover something that the article hints at, that the problem is actually inside cells and that the amyloid protein is a symptom (not a cause). It's probably something like a subtance in food confusing the immune system or a multi-cause effect related to living a lifetime under acute stress far above and beyond what we'd encounter while living in a hunter-gatherer society, or simply that we get no exercise compared to what our bodies evolved for so maybe the cellular repair mechanisms generated by our muscles aren't there to repair the nervous system (no blame here - it's hard for older folks to get enough exercise when they're hurting).
All wild speculation on my part as a computer geek who doesn't know the first thing about medicine, I'm the first to admit!
If the fundamental problem is misallocation of research dollars, then that's what should be tackled first. I'd vote to do something like a git bisect and isolate the failures first. The scale of the failures suggests that the problems go back to the beginning. So I'd start by halving the funds that go to the big players and distributing the remainder amongst smaller groups and individuals trying a wide array of different approaches.
That said, I'd predict that as theory and simulation improve, especially in areas like big data, machine learning and AI, strong correlations will be found soon (probably within 5 years, certainly 10). They'll probably discover something that the article hints at, that the problem is actually inside cells and that the amyloid protein is a symptom (not a cause). It's probably something like a subtance in food confusing the immune system or a multi-cause effect related to living a lifetime under acute stress far above and beyond what we'd encounter while living in a hunter-gatherer society, or simply that we get no exercise compared to what our bodies evolved for so maybe the cellular repair mechanisms generated by our muscles aren't there to repair the nervous system (no blame here - it's hard for older folks to get enough exercise when they're hurting).
All wild speculation on my part as a computer geek who doesn't know the first thing about medicine, I'm the first to admit!