New drug reduces onset of Alzheimer's while temperatures soar across the world, causing significant damage

Good morning and welcome today’s trxn briefing. Today’s topics include:

• A new drug is discovered that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s by a third

• Hot temperatures across much of the world are causing wildfires, flooding and deaths

• UK stocks fall as a result of lowering metal prices

• An introduction of the Availability Heuristic and how understanding it can help you make better decisions

A new drug has been shown to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s by one-third, marking a significant win for humanity’s fight against the disease

• Some good news to start this morning. Following clinical trials involving over 1,700 people, a new drug has been demonstrated to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s.

• The drug, which is called donanemab, helps patients by clearing a protein that builds up in people with Alzheimer’s.

• It has been shown to slow the pace of the disease by about a third, which means that people with Alzheimer’s can continue with normal tasks and retain hobbies for longer than they would otherwise.

• Certain groups of people ( - those at earlier stages of the disease and with less brain amyloid at baseline) derived greater benefit from the drug. For them, the drug was shown to slow progress of the disease by 30-40%. Half of the patients on donanemab were able to stop the treatment after a year, because it had cleared sufficient protein deposits in the brain.

• However, the drug isn’t without side effects. The most common was brain swelling, which was found in up to a third of patients in the donanemab trial. For most, this was resolved without causing symptoms through other drugs. Unfortunately 2 volunteers died as a result of dangerous swelling in the brain.

• The UK's drugs watchdog has started to assess the drug for use in the NHS. However, it is not clear how much it will cost or how long it would take for approval to be granted in the UK.

Extremely hot temperatures (of over 50 degrees in some places) have been ravaging through Europe, the US and parts of Asia

• Whilst it may not feel like it sat in the UK right now, temperatures have been extremely high in parts of the world.

• Several temperature records have been broken:

  • Death Valley in California hit 53.9°C on Sunday.

  • China provisionally recorded its highest temperature ever on Sunday - 52.2°C in Xinjiang.

• The hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth is 56.7°C, so we aren’t far off and the record may well be broken in the coming weeks.

• Unfortunately these high temperatures have spelt significant issues:

  • Wildfires have broken out in Greece, causing evacuations of school children from holiday camps.

  • Flooding in South Korea has led to the death of 40 people, including 12 from a collapsed tunnel about 110km south of Seoul.

• The current heatwave appears set to continue for a few weeks to come.

• However, a positive is that officials from the world’s 2 largest polluting nations, China and the US, are recommencing conversations about tackling climate change after pausing last year due to a breakdown of diplomatic relations.

UK stocks fall as a result of lower commodity prices

• FTSE 100 lost 0.4%, while the FTSE 250 midcap index fell 0.9%.

• Mining stocks fell by 2.6% as weak economic data in China (which is world’s largest commodities consumer) led to the decline of metal prices.

• Among individual stocks, Aston Martin jumped 3.7% after Barclays raised the target price on the stock to £375.

An iPhone fetches £140k at auction, whilst the Post Office are criticised for delays in repaying ex-Postmasters they wrongfully accused of stealing

• A first edition iPhone 4GB has sold in auction for the equivalent of over £140k. This was a rare edition because the 4GB was discontinued in favour of the 8GB version after only 2 months.

• The head of an inquiry into the Post Office scandal (whereby a number of Post Office owners were wrongly accused of stealing) has criticised The Post Office & government for delays in compensating victims. He warned that there is a risk that final compensation payments under one scheme (the Group Litigation Order) is not be going to be delivered by the 7 August 2024 deadline.

Concept of the day - The Availability Heuristic: how our understanding of real risks is distorted by ‘ease of recall’ and ‘retrievability’

• The Availability Heuristic points to our bias as humans to overweight things we remember.

• What we remember is influenced by many things including beliefs, expectations, emotions, and feelings, as well as the frequency of exposure. Media coverage makes a big difference. And as the graph above demonstrates, the media significantly overweights certain topics such as terrorism (relative to causes of death).

• The Availability Heuristic concept is important because it leads to mistakes in judgement. For example, Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Ariely (2008) showed that people are more likely to purchase insurance to protect themselves after experiencing a natural disaster, compared to purchasing insurance on this type of disaster before it happens.

• The ‘availability’ of certain information is in turn determined by a range of factors, which include:

  • Retrievability: For example, we are better at retrieving words from memory using the word’s initial letter than a random position like 6.

  • Exposure: People develop a preference for something as a result of familiarity with it (e.g. being able to sing along to the lyrics of your favourite song compared to listening to new music)

• The most important aspects of the Availability Heuristic are neatly summarised by Farnam Street as the following:

  • “We often misjudge the frequency and magnitude of events that have happened recently.

  • This happens, in part, because of the limitations on memory.

  • We remember things better when they come in a vivid narrative.”

• Next time you make a decision, consider whether that decision was swayed by the ‘Availability Heuristic’.