[HN Gopher] Alzheimer's cases tied to no-longer-used medical pro...
___________________________________________________________________
Alzheimer's cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
Author : leeny
Score : 496 points
Date : 2024-01-29 21:39 UTC (1 days 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.
| caycep wrote:
| there's transmissible CJD, but most cases are a genetic
| version where you get the prions from your own cells and then
| it cascades, if I recall
| 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.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Can't you make a definitive diagnosis from an autopsy.
| Could be that multiple diseases lead to the same findings
| in the autopsy.
|
| While someone is alive a diagnosis of Alzheimers is more of
| a diagnosis of elimination. There are several drugs that
| can be used to slow the progression and I assume that those
| have a role to play in solidifying the diagnosis.
| hackernewds wrote:
| That ventures wildly into whether the realm of
| physicalism explains malaises that happen in the
| "consciousness" realm. spooky
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You can check for amyloid plaques in an autopsy, but
| apparently plenty of old people that show no significant
| cognitive decline also have amyloid plaques.
|
| So, while we would definitively call it Alzheimer's if
| you have significant cognitive decline + amyloid plaques,
| it's not 100% clear that this is a single diagnostic.
| 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.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think the medicines likely reduce beta amyloid rather
| than get rid of all of it which if it has a prion like
| mechanism wouldn't really fix things.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Scientists are a bit more savvy than you are giving them
| credit. Anything neurological is unlikely to have a silver
| bullet treatment. So researchers are going after what looks
| most promising with respect to understanding the disease as
| well as a path towards treatment. Which is currently AB (or
| Tau), but there is plenty of skepticism that we are chasing
| the only measurement we have.
|
| Yet many other correlations are even hazier than AB.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| I don't think scientists are necessarily assuming a single
| cause so much as that it's a moot point since we still
| haven't identified any causes for sure.
|
| If some cases are caused by amyloid plaques and some aren't,
| for example, and we develop a treatment that cures the
| amyloid plaque cases but not the others, it will probably
| become extremely obvious that there are different causes at
| that point.
| scythe wrote:
| This finding definitely supports a brain protein hypothesis,
| but it could just as easily point to tau protein as amyloid.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399531/
| xenadu02 wrote:
| The short version as I understand it: amyloid plaques are a
| symptom but not a cause.
|
| There was a theory floating around that they're a neurological
| immune response to viral infection but I don't think there's
| enough evidence to prove that yet.
| 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
| caconym_ wrote:
| I didn't find it clickbaity at all. The contents of the article
| were exactly what I expected based on the headline, and I
| didn't know this was possible.
|
| The really interesting thing here is that Alzheimer's seems to
| be transmissible from person to person via biological material.
| The BBC headline you quoted, "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked
| to rare Alzheimer's cases", totally buries the lede and is
| borderline misleading.
| eek2121 wrote:
| I didn't either, and I didn't even read the article. The
| headline was actually dead on factual for me.
| oli-g wrote:
| For me as well, and I didn't even read the headline.
| jessriedel wrote:
| My reading is that m-i-l is using "clickbaity" to mean
| "doesn't prevent all possible wrong conclusions one could
| draw from the headline". (In this case, the wrong conclusion
| would be thinking that because there exists cases of
| alzheimer being transmitted through some mechanism that
| Alzheimer was contagious.)
|
| While it's certainly understandable that we are all tired of
| clickbait that _purposefully_ misleads the reader, imo we
| should not overcorrect by demanding that headlines cannot be
| misinterpreted by arbitrarily ignorant readers.
| m-i-l wrote:
| That's right. Living in the UK and taking an interest in
| popular science during the "mad cow disease crisis"[0], I
| had been aware that prion diseases can be transmitted in
| humans if (for example) you eat (infected) brains of your
| dead ancestors[1], but the headline as originally submitted
| ("Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's
| cases") did suggest to me that we might be at the start of
| something altogether new and much more alarming.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encepha
| lopat...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
| mike_d wrote:
| > "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious"
|
| It may not be infectious like a cold or herpes, but it was
| amazing to me that it is transmissible. I spent some time
| Googling and it looks like the appropriate term is "Donor-
| Derived Infections."
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think that, in principle, any disease that a donor has has
| some small chance of affecting the recipient. Infections,
| cancers, prion diseases, toxins are well known to do so, some
| immune issues also have a clear pathway, but in principle
| even genetic issues could affect the recipient depending on a
| whole host of complicated biology that we don't fully
| understand.
| josu wrote:
| >The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious - you
| cannot catch it from contact with people who have it.
|
| Alzheimer's being an infectious disease is still being
| researched. The article does nothing to disprove it.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I wonder if we will ever find methods of flushing the brain out
| or doing anything within the human brain that will allow us to
| defend against things like this.
|
| I know our brains are very protected in our bodies and for good
| reason but I still wonder how far we will be able to go if we
| can ever safely and humanely bypass that.
| 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.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid
| proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint:
|
| > The far wider relevance of prion mechanisms was first
| exemplified with the discovery of yeast prions but has also
| widened considerably with the recognition that the more
| common human neurodegenerative diseases, including
| Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, involve accumulation
| and spread of assemblies of misfolded host proteins in what
| is often described as a 'prion-like' fashion with
| experimental transmission of relevant pathology in primates
| or mouse models. However, the importance for human disease
| was unclear until the recognition of human transmission of
| amyloid-beta (Ab) pathology via iatrogenic routes after
| prolonged incubation periods, causing iatrogenic cerebral
| amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and raising the possibility that
| iatrogenic Alzheimer's disease may occur at even longer
| latency.
| jychang wrote:
| The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are
| common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there
| is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP
| protein.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein
|
| Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a
| prion" is close to nobel prize territory.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Perhaps a first pass research question is:
|
| Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have
| a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the
| rest of the population?
|
| Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other
| other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.
| tim333 wrote:
| There are quite a lot of diseases where a prion like
| mechanism is suspected
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases
|
| ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then
| acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up
| a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully
| understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a
| proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper:
|
| >recent cultured cell line and animal model studies
| suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do
| self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to
| neighboring cells
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/
| Thorrez wrote:
| Wikipedia seems to say there's another one:
|
| >All known mammalian prion diseases were caused by PrP
| until 2015, when a prion form of alpha-synuclein was
| hypothesized to cause multiple system atrophy (MSA).[10]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
| goku12 wrote:
| The article mentions that the procedure was banned due to
| incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That is a prion
| disease.
| klipt wrote:
| They still use pieces of cadaver for other surgeries. E.g.
| gum and bone transplants done by periodontists. Seems risky
| to me.
| woleium wrote:
| as long as it's not spine or brain matter it's probably
| okay. During the mad cow outbreak (BSE, the bovine
| equivalent of CJD) in the UK, they banned "beef on the
| bone" but not all beef.
| emayljames wrote:
| And CJD came about from farmers using ground and
| processed cow brains to feed cows. What could possibly go
| wrong feeding a cow some cow brains!
| ljf wrote:
| It is worse than that - it first made the jump to cows
| when condemned sheep, infected with the similar prion
| disease 'scrapie', were ground up and fed to cows.
| meepmorp wrote:
| There's a human prion disease, kuru, which was caused by
| the practice of funerary cannibalism - where family would
| ritually consume parts of their deceased relatives'
| bodies.
|
| The moral of the story seems to be, don't eat brains.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Which is rather unfortunate.
|
| I no longer eat meat, but when I was younger I considered
| the brains as the tastiest part of an animal, when
| properly prepared and cooked.
|
| It is said that in USA eating organs is not very popular,
| so it is likely that many have never experienced well
| cooked brains, to know what they are missing.
|
| There exists a hypothesis that is rather plausible, that
| breaking bones and eating their content of brains and
| marrow has played an important role in the evolution of
| humans, by providing an abundant source of long-chain
| fatty acids, enabling the unusual mass ratio between the
| central nervous system and the whole body that
| characterizes humans.
| woleium wrote:
| Brains, cooked contains 210 calories per 140 g serving.
| This serving contains 15 g of fat, 16 g of protein and
| 2.1 g of carbohydrate. The latter is 0 g sugar and 0 g of
| dietary fiber, the rest is complex carbohydrate. Brains,
| cooked contains 3.3 g of saturated fat and 4304 mg of
| cholesterol per serving.
|
| If you do not have risk factors for heart disease, you
| should limit your cholesterol intake to no more than 300
| milligrams a day.
|
| 1000% your rda of cholesterol in a single serving!
| djmips wrote:
| Might depend on the age of the patient.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Periodontists have been also linked with a higher number
| of Alzheimer cases. Is a group of risk in this disease.
| bagels wrote:
| The doctor or their patients have the higher risk?
| pvaldes wrote:
| if I remember correctly Dentists had more cases of
| alzheimer than other groups of doctors. I heard it some
| time ago.
|
| If is a prion, it should resist most sterilization of
| dental instruments by heat on autoclave. So is obvious
| IMAO that this could be a way to spread the disease from
| one patient to other, but I'm not an expert on clinic
| procedures and the protocols may have been updated. This
| is known, or at least suspected, since maybe a decade or
| so.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >Dentists had more cases of alzheimer than other groups
| of doctors
|
| Herpes?
|
| 1. Travels along nerve cells
|
| 2. Causes lifelong infection
|
| 3. Can enter the brain (HSV encephalitis)
|
| 4. Herpetic whitlow used to be an occupational disease of
| dental workers (still is to some extent)
|
| "Overwhelming Evidence for a Major Role for Herpes
| Simplex Virus Type 1 (HSV1) in Alzheimer's Disease (AD);
| Underwhelming Evidence against"
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234998/
| emayljames wrote:
| What I found odd, is in the article it talked of the
| importance of sterilising medical tools used, that may have
| had prions on them. Prions can't even be destroyed by extreme
| temperatures, they are extremely scary.
| kvgr wrote:
| Over 900c for several hours vs 250 in autoclave... if
| Alzhaimers can spread this way, i am done, because I spent
| days in dentist chair...
| seesawtron wrote:
| Both new and old articles are from the same lab. So they
| hypothesized it in previous article and now found signs of
| dementia in some of patients who survived. Still no evidence of
| actual transmission of A-Beta.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Prions are exactly the tiny, hard to detect things that could
| make Alzheimers transmissible. There are likely to remain many
| questions to resolve, but this sure suggests a line of inquiry:
| Is Alzheimer's one distinct disease? Can a prion be isolated as
| the cause? Can a diagnostic test be designed that detects this
| prion? Etc.
| angiosperm wrote:
| There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins.
|
| It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection.
| Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no
| such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to
| be very common.
|
| But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's
| patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem
| negligent. (Which they are.)
| rantallion wrote:
| > There is no reason to assume this is a matter of
| proteins.
|
| Except that there's increasing evidence that specific
| proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of
| dementia.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/
| 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.
| aurizon wrote:
| different to HPV. More on HSV
| https://www.healthline.com/health/herpes-simplex#causes
| caconym_ wrote:
| What do these two things have to do with each other?
| aurizon wrote:
| Not much, deer prion wasting disease is forced shape-fold
| mimicry and HPV is DNA insertions affecting repressed cancer
| causing genes having increased expression. I referenced it,
| but it does not really fit in.
| 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.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Yes, but that just would cause the derived product not to be
| needed, when it was actually actively banned because it was
| proven to have caused some cases of CJD.
| 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.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| That's not to mention the zombies. There was a huge cover up.
| bemusedthrow75 wrote:
| Not "mad cow disease", but CJD.
|
| "Mad Cow Disease" specifically refers to the variant form
| that is said to have been caused by prions from infected
| animals turning up in beef products.
|
| Though in fact all we know for sure about the link there is
| that it's the same prion in the cattle and human cases; the
| suggestion that there's a direct food chain connection is
| still only considered very likely, not proven.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Did you even try reading? It's made super clear at the start.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Yes, I read the whole thing but I missed the second half of
| the last sentence of the second paragraph. The fact that one
| poster replied that it's due to the advent of synthetic
| hormones and others replied about the spread of CJD indicates
| it's not super clear, but sibling replies got me the insight
| I was looking for.
| 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.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| it's almost certainly not, or you would see epidemiological
| evidence for chains of transmission. prion diseases require
| contact transmission which is all but absent from the
| alzheimer's story.
| throwaway8877 wrote:
| Is it still possible that the chains are there but are missed
| because of the disease very slow progress?
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| We don't eat the brains of people with Alzheimer's, so we
| don't see it transmit?
|
| I know CWD transmits from pretty much any shedding of the
| animal, but is that necessarily universally true?
|
| Can we map that onto human beings who practice hygeine and
| don't eat leaves that another human urinated on?
| karmajunkie wrote:
| consumption of neural tissue isn't the only transmission
| vector though. (See TFA for an example, in fact.) If it
| were a prion disease, just the law of averages dictates
| that we'd see some transmission from things like organ
| transplants from pre-symptomatic carriers. There's no
| evidence of that at all that i'm aware of. (disclaimer: I
| work at a startup in cognitive testing, so while i'm
| certainly not a researcher in the field, i do see quite a
| bit of research on dementia-adjacent diseases)
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| But don't you also have a windowing effect there? How
| many >50 y/o people are donating their organs?
|
| You could also explain the age skewness by allowing for
| the fact that it takes time for the prions to replicate
| to the point that you notice symptoms.
|
| Other I think this would predict: lifetime exposure to
| mutagens is a predictor for Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is
| more heritable from the mother than the father.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| > it's almost certainly not, or you would see epidemiological
| evidence for chains of transmission. prion diseases require
| contact transmission which is all but absent from the
| alzheimer's story.
|
| I think what the parent comment is saying is, what if it _isn
| 't_ transmitted, what if a prion is just occurring in the
| brains of the people who develop alzheimers?
|
| That seems unlikely to me, but on the other hand, the article
| seems to be suggesting that transferring brain proteins from
| people with alzheimers to people who are younger will cause
| them to develop alzheimers which would be roughly consistent
| with that.
|
| I don't know whether that would be possible, but, for
| example, what if there was somehow a specific protein in the
| brain that could easily be misfolded to become a prion, and
| the eventually if people live long enough they tend to
| produce that prion at least once, so it occurs essentially as
| a result of old age, but it can theoretically also be
| transmitted in the manner described in the article?
| 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, for instance, that V(D)J recombination
| satisfied Occam's razor when we asked ourselves how
| adaptive immunity worked, or how some forms of diseases
| such as SCID manifested?
|
| There is a metric ton of pure serendipity in the study of
| biology. We're drawing new connections between systems
| all the time. This is just a new data point.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding slightly the utility
| function of the logical device here.
|
| It's not so much that we cannot analyze a complex system
| using this criterion, it's moreso a tool that allows us
| to identify a logically tenable pathway for investigating
| a specific element of reality.
|
| For example, a poster above noted that I was misapplying
| the razor because he went one level below where I was
| analyzing. He's not necessarily incorrect, and neither am
| I.
|
| You interrogate reality at multiple levels of
| magnification, which is why you don't need to know how
| genes specifically work to know that they work and make
| predictions based on their prevalence, for example.
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Isn't the point that when comparing multiple explanations
| of a phenomenon one applies Occams razor to pick the "best"
| one?
|
| In this case we don't have any explanations to compare yet,
| just suggestive lines of research. So it's premature to
| bring out the razor.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during
| standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research
| about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger
| donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence
| in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence.
| Any time you take biological material out of other human beings
| and put them in a different body, it seems like you are
| introducing a lot more uncertainty and risk than when you inject
| a person with a comparatively "simple" small-molecule drug.
| axus wrote:
| My mom developed an allergy to eggs after a blood transfusion.
| She long regretted never being able to eat another chocolate
| eclair.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| That's nuts. Seems like researchers should look really
| closely at weird side effects of blood transfusions since
| these are effectively "natural experiments" that would be
| impossible or unethical to run normally.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| They do. These incidences are rare, but documented, and
| researched.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-peanut-
| aller...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562830/
|
| It looks like the allergy isn't permanent though.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Generally, I think if a patient needs blood transfusions
| there's a bigger and more immediate life-and-death problem
| right there. I think allergies would be preferable to
| death.
|
| Is my understanding correct? I hope blood transfusion
| hasn't become a routine procedure these days.
| fastball wrote:
| I don't think GC was suggesting that we stop blood
| transfusions, but rather that we do better tracking to
| improve our understanding in a way that normally would be
| unethical (if not for the fact that, as you say, blood
| transfusions are a life-saving intervention).
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Yes exactly.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| You get a blood transfusion for any major surgery.
| Arrath wrote:
| Makes me wonder if there is any possibility to give blood
| in the lead-up to your surgery, such that you're
| transfused with your own blood?
| blendergeek wrote:
| It's called an autotransfusion and it's a thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotransfusion
| mhaberl wrote:
| You get it IF there is a need for it, not always.
|
| I had an open heart surgery and didn't get a blood
| transfusion.
| theshackleford wrote:
| No.
| TechnicalVault wrote:
| Before the 1990's but not anymore. The contaminated blood
| scandal in the United Kingdom
| (https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/) and a lot of
| papers showing benefits to avoiding blood loss in the
| first place have changed practices. We haven't eliminated
| the use of allogeneic blood transfusions but they're
| indicated a lot less than they used to be.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Well, the boffins figured out somehow that if you get a
| blood transfusion from an Opossum you become immune to all
| snake venom for a while.
|
| (Seems wikipedia removed this factoid now... and other
| sources state "most" snake venom)
|
| I assume they tested on animals, not humans.
| bglazer wrote:
| Can you provide a source? That sounds unlikely
| RajT88 wrote:
| Here is something scholarly:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315628/
|
| I cannot find anything now talking about a blood
| transfusion (I probably read about it 10 years back). It
| more or less jives with the scholarly article in that
| "immunogenic effects are reported".
|
| A slightly less dry read:
|
| https://www.grunge.com/1105496/how-an-opossum-could-be-
| the-r...
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| No, eggs, not nuts.
|
| I'll see myself out.
| lynx23 wrote:
| As someone who has been deliberately used at a young age by
| a doctor for a medical experiment, I can tell you this is
| how human experiments are done these days. Take someone
| with condition X which is life threatening, and suddenly
| you can do all your unethical stuff without having to be
| afraid of consequences. You just have to crank up the
| severity and you suddenly are free to do whatever you want.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Can you sue?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| If your mom's still around let her know about vegan egg
| alternatives!
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Vegan egg tastes like butts
| elzbardico wrote:
| I am not a vegan, but I eat a lot of vegetables, most
| vegetables, if prepared correctly are delicious, there are
| a lot of traditional dishes in every cuisine in the world
| that take absolutely no animal products on their
| preparation and have a wonderful taste and aroma.
|
| I see no reason to eat those franken-foods just because
| you're a vegan, a lot of them have strange additives to
| make them taste and look like animal stuff, it is simply
| not worth the risk to eat them IMHO.
|
| Of course, this is a personal view point.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > I see no reason to eat those franken-foods just because
| you're a vegan, a lot of them have strange additives to
| make them taste and look like animal stuff, it is simply
| not worth the risk to eat them IMHO.
|
| "Just Egg" is mung bean and canola oil. You can DIY it
| for cheaper, it's like buying pancake mix. There's always
| a few strange additives for these sorts of products
| (improve shelf life, anti-caking, emulsion, whatever),
| but that's not a vegan-specific thing.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Seed oils like canola aren't great for health. They're
| fairly new to the food stream (only widely available
| since about 1900), heavily processed, and chock full of
| compounds the plant was making to protect it's seeds,
| many of which cause inflammation and other negative
| health effects. Olive oil, coconut oil, and animal fats
| have all been in use longer, and seem to be better for
| us. Avocado oil also seems to be decent, though it can be
| challenging to find quality unadulterated oils of any
| kind.
| wisty wrote:
| Any proper evidence or is this just some internet meme?
| https://www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-eating/do-
| see...
| timschmidt wrote:
| You're welcome to eat the non-food. I won't stop you.
| pnw wrote:
| Aquafaba is a completely natural vegan egg substitute
| used in baking.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquafaba
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I've used it with amazing success as a non vegan in both
| chocolate chip cookies and pancakes
| axus wrote:
| She honestly asks me to bring over vegan mayonnaise
| sometimes. She also has a good egg-free cake recipe.
| withinboredom wrote:
| You are supposed to declare your issues before (or at least
| after) you give blood. Kinda messed up that whoever donated
| that blood didn't report it. Then again, I'm glad the blood
| was available...
| elzbardico wrote:
| We can't conclude that the donor had an egg allergy. The
| immune system is complicated as hell, it could be the case
| that he had some weird protein circulating on his blood
| that was recognized by her immune system, and by chance
| this protein was structurally close enough to some egg
| protein that now eggs trigger an immune response on her.
| scythe wrote:
| Worth noting that the most prevalent protein in blood is
| albumin, and the major protein in eggs is, yep, albumin.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| Are you implying there is a connection? Even if it's just
| for nonsense, I'd love to read it. Because other
| prevalent commonalities, you could make the same argument
| about water, for example.
| twothamendment wrote:
| "The immune system is complicated as hell."
|
| You got that right! My wife used to eat a banana every
| day. Then something in her flipped and she reacts as if
| she is allergic to bananas and the rest of the world -
| not exaggerating. She can eat a very small number of
| foods and has to avoid most people because of smells. It
| isn't allergies it is - you guessed it - her immune
| system.
|
| If we could just flip it back to "normal"...
| mips_r4300i wrote:
| Same thing happened to me. I was eating bananas, beef,
| coffee, etc. then I got some sort of viral infection. My
| thyroid became inflamed for a couple months. No doctor
| was able to find anything wrong with me.
|
| Little did I know, having postviral sequelae causes my
| immune system to start hating many things I used to eat.
| A food blood sensitive test showed that bananas, beef,
| coffee were what set my immune system off the most.
|
| I was told it was gut permeability causing food particles
| to leak into the blood stream causing the immune
| response. So the fix has been to stop eating those, let
| the gut heal, and over time I've been able to eat those
| foods in moderation years later.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Some 30% of people have allergies. It can already be
| challenging to source enough blood with the current
| eligible population.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't think I ever had to declare allergies when donating
| my blood (France).
|
| They focus on infections and cancers I think.
|
| Why would they ask for allergies if we don't yet know that
| they can be transmitted like this?
| withinboredom wrote:
| I thought it was well known that certain allergies
| (eggs/peanuts) can transfer via transfusions? At least
| for awhile. It looks like there's some literature on it
| at least, but I didn't dig into it or anything. I just
| thought this was "common" knowledge since that's what I
| was told years ago by a nurse I was dating in college, a
| long time ago.
| jraph wrote:
| Maybe it's known but I don't know about it :-)
| dghughes wrote:
| I would assume things like that maybe after a bone marrow
| transplant but having a blood transfusion seems pretty
| mild I wouldn't expect any affects from it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Eggs or chicken eggs? Could always use duck eggs.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Killjoy note that the allergy may well be unrelated to the
| transfusion, despite occurring after it.
| tim333 wrote:
| Though it seems quite plausible something in the blood
| caused an immune reaction that then also gets set of by egg
| protein.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| FWIW, ChatGPT 3.5 says:
|
| "The development of a new food allergy, such as an
| allergy to eggs, as a direct result of a blood
| transfusion is extremely rare and not a well-documented
| phenomenon. Food allergies are typically triggered by
| exposure to specific allergenic proteins found in foods,
| and blood transfusions do not typically involve the
| introduction of food proteins."
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| ChatGPT 3.5 is known to make mistakes, hallucinate, and
| not care about the factuality of its responses.
|
| Given this, a comment which does nothing but quote
| chatGPT 3.5 verbatim can do more harm than not commenting
| at all, especially on health matters, where such
| qualities can constitute outright recklessness.
|
| If you want to share your own thoughts, though, I know
| I'd welcome them. At least humans have a greater than 0%
| chance of caring about the well-being of humans.
| tim333 wrote:
| Dunno but it seems not unheard of see eg. Peanut and fish
| allergy due to platelet transfusion in a child
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562830/
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling"
| power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the
| "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells
|
| Maybe the Silicon Valley 'blood boy' can be brought to market.
| aeternum wrote:
| I believe Ambrosia was the (real) startup that was the
| inspiration for that story arc.
|
| Looks like they're still around but have pivoted to boring
| wearables and of course AI.
|
| A supposed win for the FDA, but perhaps a loss to humanity
| since there does seem to be evidence that the idea actually
| worked.
| rsynnott wrote:
| For once, a pivot to AI is a bit of a relief...
| q1w2 wrote:
| Not only blood transfusions, but ligament/tendon transplants
| from cadavers are extremely common for people who tear their
| ACL.
|
| It would be a disaster if this type of surgery also transmitted
| some prior/protein misfolding disease decades later. Millions
| would be impacted. The practice stared in the 1980s, but really
| only became popular in the early 2000s with the boom in
| arthroscopic surgery standardization.
|
| Hopefully the blood-brain barrier prevents this.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Oh man, I bet you're right and enough time hasn't gone by to
| see the fallout from it! I bet rich people will start bidding
| up tendons and ligaments from younger cadavers (probably
| mostly motorcycle accident victims). Although given that so
| many of those have toxoplasmosis, maybe that's also not
| great...
| fbdab103 wrote:
| One estimate says that 30-50% of all human beings have
| toxoplasmosis, so I would put that as pretty low on the
| list of risks.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963851/
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Could they test the donor first for these proteins or
| whatever is causing it?
| PeterisP wrote:
| We probably could, but only after we'd figure out what
| exactly is causing it.
| ikrenji wrote:
| those tissues are unlikely to carry prions. prions are
| concentrated in the brain.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Unlikely != zero risk, and concentrated != isolated?
| selcuka wrote:
| > I've seen some interesting research about [...] the "young
| blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells,
|
| This is excellent material for the conspiracy theorists.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yeah see https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/14/no-peter-thiel-is-
| not-harv...
| palijer wrote:
| >Any time you take biological material out of other human
| beings and put them in a different body, it seems like you are
| introducing a lot more uncertainty and risk
|
| But this always had to be weighed against the risks of not
| getting the transfusion. Typically the consequences of not
| getting a transfusion when it is medically indicated is pretty
| severe.
|
| We don't really need to worry about unlikely not-yet-understood
| edge cases that happen years later from procedures we've done
| millions of times. We gotta gotta about blood loss.
| abirch wrote:
| Yes, usually if you need a blood transfusion there are bigger
| issues.
|
| Please remember to ask your doctor about autologous
| transfusion, where you bank your own blood before a planned
| procedure.
| TechnicalVault wrote:
| Depends what the indication is, for some kinds of trauma the
| evidence is that transfusions are what will keep the patient
| alive, e.g. you're dumping pints on the table and it's likely
| to be contaminated, you can't salvage and reinfuse. However,
| for pre-planned surgery the evidence suggests avoiding blood
| loss where you can is the best practice. Studies have also
| shown that pre-deposit autologous blood donation before
| surgery is of uncertain benefit so it tends to be contra-
| indicated in the UK at least.
|
| Before we understood the risks we used to do transfusions a
| lot more frequently than we do now and this led to a
| generation of anaesthetists who would basically treat with
| blood transfusion at the slightest sign of low blood count.
| More recent studies have suggested that a lower blood count
| can be tolerated than was previously realised and that you
| can often get away with guaranteed pathogen free (and much
| cheaper) volume expanders. There has also been developments
| in cell salvage to reinfuse suctioned blood and methods to
| avoid blood loss in the first place.
|
| Medical practice has also changed to reflect this and the
| changed evidence base, especially given the relative costs
| (hospital managers love to save money). Hip and knee
| replacement surgery used to use blood routinely and were
| almost always done under general anaesthetic, but given we
| now want to get patients out within a day or two post surgery
| we do the surgery under spinal block and minimise blood loss
| as much as we can.
|
| tldr; We still need transfusions for some things but we
| should be using them less than we do.
| bregma wrote:
| > I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred
| during standard blood transfusions.
|
| Back in the early 1990s my wife worked in epidemiology studies
| at the national blood agency in our country. There was a lot of
| work to be done since at the time being a hemophiliac and
| receiving blood products meant a good chance of dying from AIDS
| or non-A non-B hepatitis (now known as Hep C). The agency did
| not test each and every donation for the presence of these
| pathogens because the available inexpensive tests had a poor
| success rate (high false positive) and the better tests were
| prohibitively expensive and the policy was "if we destroyed any
| suspected donations we'd have to destroy all of them". The idea
| of a screening questionnaire was floated but because most
| sexually transmissible diseases are also transmissible through
| blood, the question "Have you ever had sex?" would eliminate
| quite a few donations. They were a tough time for the blood
| agency.
|
| Thankfully technology has progressed and testing for known
| pathogens in a blood sample is rapid and inexpensive. Testing
| for unknown pathogens is still a challenge.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| If you want to read more about this history in the US, I
| cannot recommend And the Band Played On highly enough. The
| book deals with the early history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic
| and touches on the issues related to blood donations and
| transfusions given the technical limitations at the time.
|
| It's also a crushingly depressing book.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| Yeah, the blood bank companies end up looking really evil
| in that. If you were a hemophiliac in the early 80s, you
| were playing Russian roulette constantly.
| seesawtron wrote:
| There is no evidence of actual transfer. It is just a possibile
| hypothesis.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > it seems like you are introducing a lot more uncertainty and
| risk
|
| Of course. What matters though isn't the absolute risk, it's
| whether such treatments provide enough benefits to outweigh
| those risks. Not dying outweighs pretty much everything.
| caycep wrote:
| There is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of
| a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably
| not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses
| getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e.
| one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of
| press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc
| after subjects passed several years later and got autopsied, they
| found clumps of parkinsonian proteins (lewy bodies) on the
| histology slides of the implanted stem cells.
|
| Similarly, there's some papers w/ mice w/ knockout Parkinsonian
| genes getting parkinsonian features and lewy bodies when injected
| w/ abnormal misfolded synuclein from another mouse.
|
| What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.
| foota wrote:
| I guess if your brain proteins are mixing with someone elses
| you normally have a bigger issue.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I don't know where _your_ neuro-jack is installed, but if it
| 's not in the skull then I don't know how you even connect to
| the all-mind.
| dimask wrote:
| > we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often
|
| Actually it may seem so [1], though still there is not any
| conclusive evidence to support a transmission hypothesis really
| as all this could be due to increased stress and such factors.
| Also, brain surgeons' increased risk of AD and more reports of
| associated risks with regard to contamination from brain
| operations [2] (similar to the article's ones) provide more
| indications that such a hypothesis is not completely
| implausible. Though also far from strongly supporting it or
| anything, as there is no proper experiment design with control
| groups etc to make better conclusions.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945313/ [2]
| https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/report-suggests-...
| devmor wrote:
| Can you explain more or give a source on that parkinsons stem
| cell trial? I'm not sure I understand what happened and I'd
| like to learn about it.
| msla wrote:
| > w/ mice
|
| Is this a special kind of mouse?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Mice are a good animal model for a lot of the human
| physiology.
| mbo wrote:
| "w/" is an abbreviation for "with". "w/ mice" should be read
| as "with mice".
| pvaldes wrote:
| The savings of just two characters does not worth the
| effort and mental pause to decode it
| RugnirViking wrote:
| it's an exceptionally common way of writing with and
| without. similar to "etc." standing for "et cetera." at
| some point you don't "decode" it, thats just what it
| means.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| It's a great abbreviation for handwriting, though. It
| also meshes really well with w/o.
| denysvitali wrote:
| w/ = with
|
| w/o = without
|
| This comment is full of abbreviations (PD = Parkinson's
| Disease, AD = Alzheimer's Disease) that makes it a bit
| difficult to read (if you don't know / realize what those
| abbreviations stand for)
| parsabg wrote:
| > What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.
|
| Sounds like a sensible next step would be to try and replicate
| this in animal models (i.e. treat animals with growth hormones
| extracted from cadavers of same species) to identify the
| proteins/prions that trigger the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's,
| which could perhaps be drug targets for at least a subset of AD
| causes.
| jokoon wrote:
| weird that the bulk of patients are in france and UK, does that
| indicate diet?
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| All the researchers are all UK based, and the UK became verrrry
| interested in prion diseases due to a very bad habit UK
| agriculture had gotten into of incorporating culled animals
| (other cattle, which furthered the spread, but the ultimate
| cause was likely grinding up sheep infected with scrapies, an
| ovine spongiform encephalopathy) supplementary cattle feed for
| animals later eaten by humans which led to the CJD outbreak in
| the UK. European agriculture also had a similar bad habit, but
| maybe less sheep or scrapies or something?
|
| France probably imported British beef and so were affected
| also. They certainly banned it the longest afterwards.
|
| And I was about to do the usual Kiwi thing of "Just let the
| cows eat grass, duh", but every Western country tends to
| supplementary feed dairy cows, including mine, except we prefer
| to use palm kernel, thus promoting deforestation in Borneo,
| yay!
|
| But it turns out a lot of British beef comes from their dairy
| herds, so "just feed the beef cattle grass" wouldn't have
| helped.
| the_optimist wrote:
| A compelling book on this topic:
|
| https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deadly-
| Feasts/Richard...
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Cows are also fed "sewage solids" from water treatment
| plants. Now that I think about it maybe I should stop eating
| / drinking cow products
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| My understanding is France has a history of ignoring risks,
| including intentional spread of HIV to patients:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_blood_scandal_in_...
| sschueller wrote:
| Interesting since the UK was part of the huge Mad Cow (BSE a
| variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob) disaster[1] in Europe back in the
| 90s which introduced new rules in Switzerland requiring marking
| origin and banning certain feeding methods.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak
| inasio wrote:
| Alzheimer's as a (transmittable) prion disease is the stuff of
| nightmares (prion disease == incurable)
| gustavus wrote:
| I'll admit that I am somewhat ignorant here. But I thoughts the
| "Alzheimer's is caused by plaque buildup in the brain" theory was
| on its last leg and pretty much disregarded by most new
| scientists.
| devmor wrote:
| I am also a layman but I believe I've read that its no longer
| believed to be caused by the plaque, but the plaque is a clear
| signal/comorbidity of the underlying cause - whatever it is?
| fastball wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised by this publication's restraint when
| referencing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as usually news orgs like
| mentioning the fact that Creutzfeldt-Jakob is the human form of
| mad cow disease.
| yungporko wrote:
| it does say that that BSE is the bovine equivalent of CJD in
| the article
| radium3d wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder if the same could occur from a bone graft from a
| cadaver, like for a tooth implant?
| LASR wrote:
| I wonder what other practices from decades ago are lurking to be
| discovered as catastrophic to currently living people.
|
| I remember reading about cattle rearing practices a while ago
| that might be responsible for some prion related diseases. Can't
| remember the exact source. These things get you from entirely
| unrelated sources.
| Gare wrote:
| There was a whole epidemic:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak
| lswank wrote:
| "Is it circumcision?" I love how this is what people say when
| reading over my shoulder.
| anthk wrote:
| Thanks to CIC Biogune too for the early research:
|
| https://www.cicbiogune.es/news/us-alzheimer-association-fund...
| hackernewds wrote:
| I thought the beta ameloid theory was largely debunked since the
| publisher had manipulated data. Now it's attached again? I'm so
| confused
| tim333 wrote:
| It's complicated. Read all about it
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid...
| caesil wrote:
| This is one of the reasons that, despite no direct evidence of
| harm, I will only ever take marine collagen instead of bovine
| collagen.
|
| Do not fuck with the possibility of ingesting cow nervous system
| tissue, let alone human.
| dmead wrote:
| Tell that to my heart valve. All bovine baby.
| yungporko wrote:
| why is cow or hunan nervous system tissue particularly
| dangerous? what animal is marine collagen from and why is it
| less dangerous?
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Prions.
|
| Non-mammal prions have a different enough shape to avoid
| breaking mammalian biomechanisms.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Might be somewhat related. Government in Canada has fully
| legalize what they call MAID (Medical assistance in dying). Do
| they know something big might be coming soon.
|
| http://hmi-us.com/publications/sars-cov-2-prion-like-domains...
| elcook4000 wrote:
| This is really fascinating, horrifying and hopeful at the same
| time.
|
| It makes sense that some neurodegenerative diseases with unknown
| etiologies are caused by prions or prion-like proteins.
|
| It could be fruitful to study the rate of Alzheimer's among
| nursing assistants who work in elder care. I found a few
| resourcas stating a higher rate for caregiver's in general along
| with nurses.
|
| I have thought decreased immune function from aging leads to the
| increased permeability of the blood brain barrier: which leads to
| the infiltration of pathogens and now possibly prions.
|
| I would assume this could be, or possibly has been, studied in
| animal models.
| tim333 wrote:
| From my limited understanding the blood brain barrier doesn't
| really stop things. However it is difficult to transmit from
| one person / animal to another usually resulting from things
| like transplants or being injected in.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Prions are most scary bit of biology there is. Almost impossible
| to eleminate, causes victim proteins to unfold.
| parsabg wrote:
| Sounds like a sensible next step would be to try and replicate
| this in animal models (i.e. treat animals with growth hormones
| extracted from cadavers of same species) to identify the
| proteins/prions that trigger the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's,
| which could perhaps be drug targets for at least a subset of AD
| causes.
| Qem wrote:
| If they still have some samples of this old, corpse-sourced
| hormone, perhaps they can analyse them to try isolate candidate
| compounds.
| emayljames wrote:
| For CJD the testing isn't needed, it is established that cows
| eating processed cow brains caused the outbreak.
| meindnoch wrote:
| prions
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Give me the friggen files. Here is a hard drive.
| troyvit wrote:
| This "one weird trick" will eat your brain!
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| ...Michael J. Fox?
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