Edit: March 24, 2024
According to this paper, TauRx Parses Subgroups to Make the Case for Methylene Blue Derivative, Again alzforum.org/news/conferenc... some researchers are not really buying the effectiveness of LMTM (a stable reduced form of MB) for AD. Apparently this drug company goes through a lot of statistical and analytical gymnastics to find the silver lining in their trial results.
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So... they did a trial with Methylene Blue for AD back in 2014 core.ac.uk/reader/29151100 and determined the minimum effective dose was 138 mg (it is not). They also found it was hard to stomach 138 mg, but if you took it with food then you absorbed less.
So... they did another trial in 2016 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl... with LMTM (a stable reduced form of MB) for AD. This time they gave one group 150 mg a day, another group 250 mg a day, and they gave the control arm 8 mg a day (4 mg twice a day) JUST TO TURN THEIR PEE BLUE SO THEY WOULD NOT KNOW THEY WERE THE CONTROL ARM. They figured 8 mg a day would not skew anything as the 2014 study had already shown that 69 mg was much less effective than 138 mg.
Here is the interesting part: In the 2016 study, the control group taking 8 mg a day did just as well as the 150 mg and 250 mg a day groups! Except the 150 and 250 mg groups had a bunch of gastrointestinal issues ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
One more thing about the 2016 study: LMTM was ineffective at any dose if the patient was on other AD drugs. It only worked as a monotherapy.
There is a whole lot more information in this 2018 paper: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...
Here is one more amazing story about LMTM: content.iospress.com/articl...