Medical Xpress December 9, 2025
When neurologist Steven Arnold is deciding whether to treat an Alzheimer’s patient with a new therapy, he relies on averages.
“Many people get put on something because it showed a statistically significant though slight benefit in a few thousand diverse people in a big placebo-controlled trial,” said Arnold, principal investigator at the Alzheimer’s Clinical & Translational Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “They then just stay on it forever, because we think maybe it is slowing the decline more than the placebo.”
Arnold is frustrated with the status quo in medicine of doctors treating individual patients using results gathered from groups. He imagines a more personalized approach: understanding whether a specific...
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