[HN Gopher] Alzheimer's cases tied to no-longer-used medical pro...
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Alzheimer's cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
Author : leeny
Score : 91 points
Date : 2024-01-29 21:39 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I thought it was still early in 2024 and we have this news but
| good to know you need to actually transplant brain matter to get
| it
| Terr_ wrote:
| 4 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179368
|
| Recycled comment follows.
|
| ___________
|
| To highlight:
|
| > The authors and other scientists stress that the research is
| based on a small number of people and is related to medical
| practices that are _no longer used_.
|
| Also that there is zero-reason to believe in any person-to-person
| spread:
|
| > The study does not suggest that forms of dementia such as
| Alzheimer's disease can be contagious.
|
| Lastly, a fun vocabulary word [not in that article]: "Iatrogenic"
| - An illness caused by medical examination or treatment.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Another one is "nosocomial" - (disease) originating in a
| hospital
| dekhn wrote:
| Don't forget nosocomial- infections acquired in a healthcare
| setting.
| rajup wrote:
| My understanding was the beta-amyloid hypothesis itself is under
| some amount of scrutiny and may not truly explain Alzheimer's.
| Wonder if this finding adds more evidence for the amyloid
| hypothesis.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I thought CJD was caused by a prion. Was it in the growth
| hormone prep from the cadavers?
| treyd wrote:
| Yeah that's correct. The article mentions a few cases of
| people who died from transmitted CJD that may have also
| received some beta amyloid or tau proteins that could have
| catalyzed development into Alzheimer's if only they didn't
| die from CJD, which seems to develop more quickly through
| that route. If Alzheimer's is truly is some kind of prion-
| related disease, which the research is suggesting.
| kibibu wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of
| hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of
| protein into recipients' brains. In some cases, it had
| induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob
| disease, or CJD -- a finding that led to the banning of the
| procedure 40 years ago.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Not sure why scientists has to pin point a single cause where
| as you have different vectors that can cause the same disease
| is also plausible
| pedalpete wrote:
| Or that we've been lumping multiple different types of
| cognitive decline as a single disease.
| arcticfox wrote:
| They don't, but my surface understanding is that the
| medicines that effectively nuke beta amyloid have no effect
| overall. Which would mean it's not even one of many causes,
| it seems to not be a cause at all.
| m-i-l wrote:
| Slightly more clickbaity title than the BBC's "Medicine stopped
| in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases"[0] which also says
| "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious - you cannot
| catch it from contact with people who have it... The researchers
| say all of the people in their study had been treated as a child
| with cadaver-derived human growth hormone, or c-hGH, that was
| contaminated with brain proteins that are seen in Alzheimer's
| disease... used to treat at least 1,848 people in the UK between
| 1959 and 1985".
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68126907
| bjourne wrote:
| Afaict, this is not an entirely new finding. For example, this
| page (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07771-6)
| references a 2018 article about the issue of Alzheimer's being
| transmitted (or rather "seeded") through growth hormone extracted
| from cadavers. Perhaps the new article provides additional
| evidence or perhaps the other article only suspected a casual
| link and this one proves that there is one. I haven't read it
| thoroughly.
|
| What I find interesting and scary is the "seeding" part. The
| small amount of growth hormone injected to the children cannot
| itself have caused Alzheimer's. But it must have caused some
| rewiring of the brain to make it accumulate more plaque which
| over a period of many decades slowly decreased their brain
| performance. If this effect is synthesizeable then one can easily
| imagine many countries using it to develop terrifying biological
| weapons.
| diob wrote:
| It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of
| prions.
| aurizon wrote:
| New prion diseases are being found in other animals and might
| evolve to enter humans. There is a deer version being watched -
| not yet found in people, AFAWK?
| https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/index.html
|
| There have been many cases of assorted Human Papilloma viruses
| (HPV) transmitted by kissing as well as assorted variances of
| oral sex. Recent vaccines are very
| effective.https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/public/index.html
| CommanderData wrote:
| Do you mean HSV? I have seen articles implicating that virus
| but it's the first time I've heard of a HPV association.
| genman wrote:
| So is this small bit of information any use for figuring out the
| general case?
| Reubend wrote:
| Yes, definitely. It hints to the root cause being "very similar
| in many respects to what happens in the human prion diseases
| like CJD, with the propagation of these abnormal aggregates of
| misfolded proteins and misshapen proteins."
|
| So while this might be unrelated to the general cases, it's
| still a promising area of investigation.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Why isn't the procedure used anymore, since they stopped using it
| before this was discovered?
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Because it was shown to also spread a prion disease (CJD,
| though not the variant kind as far as I have understood)
| Reubend wrote:
| As the article says, there is now a synthetic hormone which is
| given to the patients. We don't need to extract the hormone
| from dead people anymore.
| skissane wrote:
| We worked out to produce these hormones (or equivalent
| compounds) synthetically, so we no longer need to extract them
| from the brains of deceased humans, a procedure which risks
| transmitting disease.
|
| Not just human growth hormone, also other hormones used to be
| derived this way, e.g. those used to induce ovulation in
| fertility treatment.
|
| I know someone who received cadaver-derived fertility hormones
| in the 1980s. She has a small risk of developing CJD and dying
| from it. It hasn't happened yet, and probably never will, but
| no one can say for sure if she is infected. If you don't
| develop symptoms (some people are infected but never progress,
| others suddenly develop symptoms one day after decades of being
| asymptomatic), the only way to know for sure if you had it is
| at autopsy, through destructive testing of brain tissues.
| munificent wrote:
| Second paragraph of the article:
|
| _> In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of
| hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of
| protein into recipients' brains. In some cases, it had induced
| a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD
| -- a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years
| ago._
|
| In other words, it gave people mad cow disease.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| I've often wondered if Alzheimer's is actually novel instances of
| prion disease.
|
| For instance, Kuru was developed within I think a handful of
| generations in a population of ~20,000 with limited opportunities
| for transmission (only transmitted when someone dies and their
| family eats their brain).
|
| If the base incidence rate for a novel prion is that high, can
| you explain Alzheimer's as just that? It would be sad news for
| pharmaceutical companies - it would render Alzheimer's as a
| disease in the same class as cancer. Total systems breakdowns
| that are low-probability but inevitable on a long enough
| timescale.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I actually don't believe this conclusion based off the fact that
| it would be slam-dunk evidence for the pathogenesis of
| Alzheimer's, which we don't have.
| echelon wrote:
| Multiple pathways could lead to the disease.
|
| It's entirely possible that a metabolic dysfunction or viral
| origin causes immune dysfunction and the downstream
| dysregulation, misfolding, amyloid/tau signals, etc.
|
| There might be multiple entry points to causing this disease.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| That might be true, but I don't think this makes the
| conclusion any more compelling because it now fails Occam's
| razor.
|
| Chances are greater the conclusion is simply incorrect.
| echelon wrote:
| > it now fails Occam's razor.
|
| I mean, mechanistically speaking, so does cancer. I don't
| think that's quite the lens to apply to biological systems.
|
| Biology is wildly complex and subverts expectations all the
| time.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| It is the lens to apply to any system.
|
| You don't defend a tenuous conclusion by doubling down
| with a tenuous defense.
|
| "Science" is constantly inaccurate. I can pull two papers
| right now with opposing conclusions.
|
| Assuming a scientific conclusion is simply incorrect is a
| pretty good bet, even if you have absolutely no context
| or idea what is happening at all.
| echelon wrote:
| > It is the lens to apply to any system.
|
| I can point to countless instances where it fails to
| adequately guide investigation in biology.
|
| Occam's razor leads to premature simplification. When the
| space is vast, dynamical, and unknown, it's absolutely
| not a tool.
|
| Do you think V(D)J recombination satisfied Occam's razor
| when we asked ourselves how adaptive immunity worked?
|
| There is a metric ton of pure serendipity in the study of
| biology.
| cbsmith wrote:
| That's a misapplication of the razor here. The simplest
| explanation for the statistically unusual prevalence of the
| disease amongst these patients is indeed that there is a
| causal link.
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(page generated 2024-01-29 23:00 UTC)