I continue to be stunned by these interesting articles in this month's PLoS Medicine.

I got a chance to sit down today and read through the article entitled"Cholinesterase Inhibitors: Drugs Looking for a Disease?"

Now, we learned about these drugs in medical school as a "temporarily effective" measure against Alzheimer's disease. They are prescribed because nothing else can really be done for Alzheimer's patients, and the experience with them was that they seemed to slightly delay the progression of dementia. Well, it turns out, the benefit was probably entirely due to placebo effect and these drugs have never been adequately proven to improve syptoms or delay dementia in these patients.

An amazing paper considering how broadly these drugs are prescribed, that and with long-term treatment (not studied extensively in clinical trials to date) the drugs may increase mortality. It's better just to give the patients obecalp that these crap drugs.

To those interested in siRNA therapeutics they also have this article on curing West Nile and Japanese Encephalitis virus (in mice) using a single lipid-tagged siRNA targeting the envelope protein. Great stuff.