Thank you for the link.
From the text:
“They seem to be significantly improved in terms of what they can do. It is function that has improved and in many cases mood as well,” Prof Macfarlane said.
“To me, seeing real improvements to patients is much more important than seeing a statistically significant improvement on a rating scale."
“Seeing people regaining abilities is far more powerful and important than that.”
Transcribing directly from the audio:
"What's important in the trials is not so much how well people do on some memory scale, what's important is the outcome for the patients themselves and to see changes in people's lives is the most important thing."
"The information we've heard from our patients today is that it's people outside the family who notice these changes as well, people who haven't seen the patients for several months commenting on how remarkably well they've done."
Interviwer: "Obviously there's a long way to go, but the promise of this, it's looking good."
Prof. Macfarlane: "It's looking good at this stage, what's required is a much larger trial with a placebo control group to see if the changes we've observed in this early study are actually real and pan out in a properly well conducted study."
OK so he makes a caveat at the end. He's not being dismissive. It's same thing astronomers say when they find a new planet. Findings that don't pass the first hurdle get discarded right away. But when the data looks promising for a candidate, it gets reported because it "probably" is a planet, but of course they will stipulate that more data is needed to confirm it. Exo-Planet detection is still relatively new but the longer they stay at it the better they get at screening out false positives. There are now thousands of confirmed exo-planets in our steller neighbrthood. Similarly, Macfarlane has been at this for a long time now, has witnessed a lot of failures and if he really thought it was a dud, I think he would have actually said something like your statement below.
"McFarland agrees that the accounts of the drug improving a few patients symptoms are not proof of anything. ..."
Also, (see above transcript) what Macfarlane agrees with is that "It's looking good."
This is a little like analyzing Janet Yellon's remarks. :)
Now, one could jump all over "...pan out in a properly well conducted study." and put a negative spin on that. Is he implying that the current study is no good, not properly well conducted? No. Consider the context. The study in question was primarily designed for dosage determination, extended safety and secondarily, statistical memory tests to put on charts. It was properly well conducted for that. What it wasn't looking for was remakable real life functional improvents. That's why they are described as "unexpected", but nevertheless duly recorded, as on the recent conferance poster presentation.
Getting back to the planet analogy, at first they didn't really expect to find any around red dwarf stars, so they didn't look for them there. When one was found, it was unexpected. Now that they know to look are not only finding lots of them in orbit but even in the habitable zone.
Previous AD drugs were so poor they didn't structure trials to look for such functional improvements.
