[tim333]

>clamouring of families trying to get their hands on anti-fungal drugs in the future in the hope that it helps their loved ones but we simply won't know if this will help until there's more data.

It may not be so hard to get data - try anti-fungals and see if the patients get better. There are plenty of patients and the drugs could be tried in countries other than the US. It could be possible to get data in a few weeks rather than years of trials.

There seem to be about a dozen anti-fungals at the moment which could be tried. Presumably the best choice would depend on which fungi was involved. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381184

[fernly]

> try anti-fungals and see if the patients get better

I got the impression that the disease symptoms result not from the mere presence of the fungus, but from progressive damage over a long time. So, if you don't start to treat until there are symptoms, you could kill the fungus and at best, the person would not get worse. Which is not to be dismissed, but...

[tim333]

It's hard to know till you try it but the experiment seems easy to do and reasonably low risk - the risk from anti-fungals is probably less of a worry than dying from Alzheimer's. So it seems worth giving it a shot even if the probabilities of success are low. The nervous system seems to have some recovery abilities, more from retraining surviving neurons than growing new ones.

[coldtea]

>So, if you don't start to treat until there are symptoms, you could kill the fungus and at best, the person would not get worse. Which is not to be dismissed, but..

It's "not to dismissed"? It's the difference between life and death!