Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[nidan7500]

For the interim analysis, the researchers included data from the first 3,979 participants. Two-thirds of them had MCI and one-third had dementia, and their average age was 75. At baseline, about three-fourths of the cohort had been diagnosed with prodromal or full-blown AD. Importantly, they were almost equally likely to have this diagnosis whether or not they turned out to actually have amyloid plaques, Rabinovici found. In other words, in a community setting, diagnosing challenging cases was only 50 percent accurate. About 40 percent of people labeled as having AD did not have amyloid plaques, while more than half of those with other diagnoses did have them. Unsurprisingly, clinicians changed many diagnoses after seeing these data, with the percentage of AD cases rising from 78 to 95 in the amyloid-positive group, and falling from 73 to 15 in the amyloid-negative group. Thus, scans seemed to have the largest effect in ruling out Alzheimer’s disease in uncertain cases.

https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/clinical-use-amyloid-scans-change-two-thirds-treatment-plans

Kind of like flipping a coin for the Amyloid thesis. If I had just purchased BIIB after their recent PR and then became aware of these clinical facts I would wonder what all the hype was about. Even more evidence that there is no causal certainty between plaque occurrence and AD. Is this why BP stopped trials? Why did the hype recently even get published since this has been known for a while and responsible adults would have at least put in heavy qualifiers. OK I guess b/c BIIB did say they were still evaluating the data even while they pumped their trial results which now are even more meaningless.