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To: FredZarguna
Are these issues actually addressed in the full article?

Yes. Download the full article.

70 posted on 08/26/2011 3:12:15 PM PDT by Swordmaker (This tag line is a Microsoft product "insult" free zone.)
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To: Swordmaker
Are these issues actually addressed in the full article?

Yes. Download the full article.

You'd better re-read the article. The criticisms offered in my post ARE NOT addressed. In fact, after reading the article, I would say that your claim that periodontal spirochetosis is an AD cause is the most tenuous of the conclusions offered. There are plenty of alternative explanations and causality is not really demonstrated. 10% of AD patients even in this very small study showed no evidence of neurospirochetosis.

Furthermore, the absence of evidence of spirochete infection in the control is very compelling in the Lyme case, but again, this doesn't establish necessarily that Lyme disease is a cause of AD, so much as the formation of senile plaques may be caused by multiple inflammatory agents, which manifest themselves in forms so similar that they're indistinguishable from AD [very much like the current controversy concerning brain trauma and what may or may not be an ALS spectrum.]

Unfortunately for the claims you make in your follow-up to the article, in the control group, >30% of patients in the control without AD have oral spirochetosis, with no evidence of AD or neurospirochetosis. How do we infer oral bacteria are the cause of an illness that >30% of positive patients do not display, and that 10% of symptomatic patients do not suffer from?

Sorry, but the abstract effectively does abstract the article, and while the association is strong, the application of the standard epidemiological axioms to bring association to causality does not appear to be as strong as you suggest. The author herself says, "indicative." That is a great basis for a lot more research. But it isn't a smoking gun.

110 posted on 08/26/2011 9:15:19 PM PDT by FredZarguna (Not forbidden by the laws of Physics, so, it must be OK.)
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