A landmark paper in the field of Alzheimer’s research has been accused of containing fabricated data. Whether this potential falsification is enough to topple the primacy of the amyloid hypothesis remains to be seen
is by far the most common cause of dementia, a progressive decline in brain function most common among the elderly. In America more than 6m people live with the disease, at a cost of over $300bn a year. Despite such vast sums, no single cause for Alzheimer’s has yet been identified.
According to this hypothesis, the clumping together in the brain of amyloid-beta peptides, long molecules consisting of chains of amino acids, can trigger the sort of neurological breakdown associated with Alzheimer’s. Though the exact causal connections remain unclear, patients with the disease are almost always found to have plaques in the brain that are formed by amyloid proteins.
All the more reason, then, to worry. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University, raised the alarm when he analysed images from the 2006 paper and identified signs that suggested that experimental results had been fabricated. Most egregious were images of blot tests—in which protein molecules found in a sample are separated to appear as blots on a membrane—where certain identical blots inexplicably appeared in multiple places.
Georg Meisl, an Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of Cambridge, agrees that the hypothesis is built on sturdier foundations than Dr Lesné’s paper. All the same, he says, “we should appreciate the complexity of the problem and that many factors, such as inflammation, may play together. The field is increasingly moving toward such more nuanced models of the disease.”
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