Leading Alzheimer’s theory undermined: Did tampering waste 16 years of research?
Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research across an entire field may have been wasted due to potentially falsified data that helped lay the foundation for the leading hypothesis of what causes Alzheimer’s disease.
The allegations centre around a landmark 2006 study — a paper which has been cited nearly 2,300 times — whose findings identify a protein called amyloid beta as a cause of Alzheimer’s. Since then, the hypothesis that sticky deposits of amyloid beta form plaques in the brain that slow cognition has dominated Alzheimer’s research and treatment development.
