[erikreinertsen]

This article does NOT provide compelling evidence that fungi are the causative agent for AD. It merely reports correlative observations.

You may conclude that antifungal drugs could help patients with AD. You may also think that vaccination or some other mechanism of prevention could reduce the prevalence of AD. These conclusions are simply not supported by the data.

I am a biomedical data scientist, not a neuroimmunologist, so I asked a colleague in my MD/PhD program who has experience in the latter field. His thoughts:

"There are a number of concerning issues here:

1) They are using polyclonal antibodies. I don't think they addressed possibility of cross-reactivity. Comparing Alzheimer's disease vs control brain is like comparing apples and oranges. There can be very different inflammatory states between the two and yield different antigenic environments.

2) The possibility that neurofibrillary tangles or amyloid plaques are sticky and can non-specifically bind antibodies remains a possibility.

3) Only immunohistochemistry? Could have at least done some qPCR especially since they can grow these fungi for quantiation. The only other paper that observed fungus in CNS of AD patients is by the same group. The high possibility of artifact is has not been ruled out."

*edited grammatical typo