[HN Gopher] Did the ancient Greeks and Romans experience Alzheim...
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Did the ancient Greeks and Romans experience Alzheimer's?
Author : joveian
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-02-11 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (today.usc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (today.usc.edu)
| _Microft wrote:
| Maybe this is an interesting article in this context:
|
| _,,They Were Labeled Witches. They Just Had Dementia"_ ,
| https://narratively.com/they-were-labeled-witches-they-just-...
|
| Discussed in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27343868
|
| This might be interesting because here people with dementia were
| _not_ classified as suffering from cognitive impairment but as
| witches. It went as far as considering dementia purely a white
| people disease that didn't occur in Africa. Maybe the Greeks and
| Romans did similar mistakes (e.g. treating them as seers, oracles
| or such)?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Or maybe the people with dementia died off early in the cycle
| before it became pronounced enough for other people to truly
| notice and remark on it. Life is much safer nowadays and we
| tend to forget all the guardrails we have up for everyone
| genter wrote:
| > with sedentary behavior and exposure to air pollution largely
| to blame.
|
| Both of my grandpas worked manual labor their entire lives. One
| had Alzheimer's, the other started to develop dementia but is on
| medicine now.
|
| Interesting thing to note, both were extremely intelligent. Seems
| like the more intelligent of my extended family were also more
| likely to have memory issues.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| You edited out their jobs, but I saw before the edit. Without
| restating those jobs I'll say that one would have had exposure
| to emissions from 2-cycle mixed oil/gasoline engines. The other
| would have had exposure to lead solder fumes.
| genter wrote:
| I edited that out because I thought it was superfluous, but
| you're right. Also the plumber smoked.
|
| (To those curious, one was a logger, the other was a
| plumber.)
| genter wrote:
| Upon further thought, the Romans were exposed to lead,
| their water pipes were made from lead (installed by
| plumbers), not to mention pewter and bronze objects.
|
| And they were certainly breathing lots of smoke from their
| cooking fires. Although wood smoke is probably less
| hazardous than two stroke oil.
| tptacek wrote:
| This article uses the example of the Tsimane people of Bolivia as
| a model for pre-industrial society, and notes that a very low
| percentage of older Tsimane experience measured dementia
| (something like 1% compared to 11% in North America). But it's
| also the case that the at-birth life expectancy of a Tsimane
| person is quite low compared to the rest of North America; a
| smaller percentage of Tsimane survive to the age at which
| Alzheimers becomes a major epidemiological issue in modern
| societies. How does a researcher account for that? It seems like
| it could be a confounder.
| Detrytus wrote:
| But wasn't that also the case in antiquity/middle ages? People
| not experiencing Alzheimer's because they did not live long
| enough?
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, so the premise of the article is an inquiry into
| whether there is something neuroprotective about the
| lifestyle or environment of premodern civilization.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm guessing that Cicero, Galen, et al. would have primarily
| been looking at upper-crust Romans. Tribal groups are
| necessarily more equal.
| Gare wrote:
| It is estimated that about 12% of Romans that survived first
| 10 years of life (half of them died before that, but _cest la
| vie_ if you don 't have vaccines and antibiotics) lived to be
| 70 years or older.
|
| Currently, this figure is 43% worldwide _from birth_. But
| fertility is also way lower as a response to low infant and
| child mortality.
|
| So 3.5x increase in over-70 population seems a decent
| guesstimate. In developed countries even more.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Do you suspect a higher percentage of those of the Tsimane who
| died young would have developed dementia after 65 (which seems
| to be the cutoff they're using)? That would be an interesting
| result, but unless there's some reason to think it, it's just
| one of many potential hypotheses.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know! I think the subtext of the article is that the
| Tsimane have, _ceteris paribus_ , a lower incidence of
| dementia --- that if you could keep the lifestyle and
| environment constant and raise the at-birth life expectance
| of these people to modern standards, they'd still have low
| rates of dementia. I'm wondering if that's true, and how
| you'd go about investigating that.
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| I often wonder what the effects of reduced infant mortality
| will be on the population. For all of human history before
| about 100 years ago, we were aggressively selected for survival
| at birth or shortly after. Now, we're not. All those people who
| would have died might not only suffer other health problems in
| their life but propagate the "die as a baby" genes to their
| offspring. Optimistically, it might mean that humans both
| become dependent on those medical technologies that save babies
| and mothers, and maintain the capability to provide them so
| we're fine. It could be a positive direction for evolution,
| like how we're already adapted to depend on ancient
| technologies like housing, clothing, and cooking. But maybe
| it's just bad and future generations will be generally get less
| and less healthy.
| tomthe wrote:
| The head sizes of babies are actually getting larger over the
| past decades [1]. This might be because of better nutrition,
| but maybe it is by a large part because we can do caesarean
| sections in every hospital now and head size is not as
| limited as it was before anymore.
|
| [1]: not the best source, but one I could find now: https://w
| ww.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/07853890.2011.5...
| ramblenode wrote:
| > a smaller percentage of Tsimane survive to the age at which
| Alzheimers becomes a major epidemiological issue in modern
| societies. How does a researcher account for that? It seems
| like it could be a confounder.
|
| This would be an issue if Alzheimers is part of a phenotype
| that raises all-cause mortality in the young. I'm not aware of
| any research on this. Alzheimers is known to be correlated with
| certain lifestyle and immune factors, and these factors might
| be expressions of a common phenotype that also increases early
| mortality and is moderated by pre-industrial environments---
| e.g. increased risk-taking or decreased immunity.
|
| A common phenotype hypothesis might explain some of the
| difference in Alzheimers incidence between Tsimane and
| Westerners, but it would be surprising if it were the main
| reason. Assuming the hypothesis only, an Alzheimers delta of
| 11x for those over 65 implies a mortality rate delta of 11x
| between the under-65 phenotype groups. That is a massive
| effect, and if it includes child mortality, we would expect to
| see genetic drift over time and a lower genetic predisposition
| to Alzheimers among Tsimane (has that been studied?).
| cubefox wrote:
| So far I heard mention of unknown environmental contaminants as
| suspected causes for rising rates of:
|
| - obesity
|
| - cancer
|
| - depression, ADHD, autism, gender dysphoria
|
| - dementia
| lanstin wrote:
| All worth exploring. You forgot low sperm production. We are
| surrounded by manufactured molecules that mimic hormones from
| our bodies, an experiment with not much of a control group, and
| an experiment where the naive materialist model would lead one
| to expect effects.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Asthma, IIRC there was also a study that showed just living
| adjacent to roads with high truck traffic caused sizable
| increases in percent of children who developed asthma compared
| to other local neighborhoods.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Here's the abstract of the actual paper:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38277296
|
| > "Conclusions: The modern 'epidemic level' of advanced dementias
| was not described among ancient Greco-Roman elderly. The possible
| emergence of advanced ADRD in the Roman era may be associated
| with environmental factors of air pollution and increased
| exposure to lead. Further historical analysis may formulate
| critical hypotheses about the modernity of high ADRD prevalence."
|
| Air pollution has near-zero explanatory power, though. See:
| "Global, regional, and national burden of Alzheimer's disease and
| other dementias, 1990-2019" at:
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2022.9374...
|
| "High-income North America" has the highest age-standardized
| incidence rate, whereas smog-shrouded South Asia has the lowest.
| East Asia, infamous for industrial and urban air pollution, is
| also fairly low on the list. From this data, there's apparently
| zero correlation between pollution and incidence rate.
| Retric wrote:
| Current air pollution levels isn't indicative of lifetime or
| especially childhood exposure.
|
| Leaded gas for example has seen a huge decline, but was still a
| thing when current 70+ year olds where young. Similarly,
| current developing economies where very different 50 years ago.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Sure, but even so it's not clear that air pollution is a
| factor. Some researchers recently compiled a "chronology of
| global air quality" which might be worth a review to see if
| any correlations can be uncovered. At a glance, it looks to
| me as though Europe and the USA cleaned up their act a long
| time ago -- so unless pollution exposure _in early childhood_
| is somehow especially bad, pollution still has no explanatory
| power: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7536029/
|
| There's also a paper which reviews the "global incidence of
| young-onset dementia" -- and, again, incidence in the low-
| pollution USA is higher than in high-pollution developing
| countries. https://alz-
| journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.100...
| beAbU wrote:
| Leaded gas was a thing when current 30 year olds were young.
| smcin wrote:
| Surely studies could get a good control group of people who
| grew up in rural Montana, or the Andes. Assume we can find
| groups with near-zero lifetime exposure to atmospheric
| (and/or waterborne) lead. What's their background rate of
| Alzheimer's?
| prepend wrote:
| Not really [0], leaded gas was completely banned in the US
| in 1996 but really hadn't been used since the early 80s and
| had start the phase out in 1996.
|
| So you'd probably need to look at people in their 50s who
| really had an impact of lead from auto fuel.
|
| [0] https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1133434_why-did-
| the-wor...
| argiopetech wrote:
| Where "completely" in this case implies "for road-going
| vehicles". General aviation (largely small, piston-engine
| planes) still overwhelmingly run on 100 octane low-lead
| (100LL).
| bparsons wrote:
| This is correct. Environmental accumulation would be highest
| in the areas that industrialized first.
| Systemling0815 wrote:
| Good point, you should immediately notify the UCLA
| gerontologists of their major scientific blunder.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| _Nullius in verba_. You 'd be well advised to take a
| skeptical view of every scientific paper -- especially those
| promoted by University PR departments.
|
| Besides, "it's air pollution's fault" was a throwaway
| statement by those UCLA gerontologists. It wasn't the focus
| of their study; it was simply an unsupported notion of what
| might explain the supposedly higher rate of Alzheimer's
| disease in Rome as opposed to Ancient Greece. (I write
| _supposedly_ because they don 't really have enough for a
| statistically valid conclusion. What they have is: "In the
| writings that have survived, the Greeks mentioned something
| like Alzheimer's once. The Romans mentioned it four times.
| Now what could account for this presumptive discrepancy?
| We'll assume that it could have been lead or dirtier air.")
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Scientific? It's just career manure until it's been
| replicated
| malux85 wrote:
| It has been MANY, MANY years since the alignment of academic
| institutions was solely meritorious, perverse incentives
| distort truth regardless of infomation source.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I'm curious about the day to day environment the Tsimane live in
| since I can see a relationship between dementia and increased
| accidental deaths in more dangerous environments. Let's say you
| need to walk 5 miles a day through a predator infested jungle for
| water. Getting lost one day due to an episode of dementia could
| easily kill you. Same for eating a poisonous plant or drinking
| water from the wrong source or even getting a simple cut that
| becomes infected due not paying attention. The study used 65 as a
| cutoff which is before most physical deteriorations so
| individuals are likely still self-reliant.
| frozenport wrote:
| Whats up with the fixation on air pollution?
|
| Indoor air pollution was astronomically higher when people were
| gathered around a warm hearth.
| e44858 wrote:
| Air pollution had high amounts of lead before leaded gasoline
| was banned in cars. Lead is way more toxic than wood smoke.
| frozenport wrote:
| Yeah but as the article mentioned this wasn't really a issue
| until the Romans were conquered by the Lombards and their
| nearly invincible Lamborghinis.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| The more problems that can be attributed to air pollution, the
| stronger the argument against cars/industry.
|
| The green movement is therefore putting lots of effort into
| researching this topic.
| acadapter wrote:
| The first part of Book 3 in Marcus Aurelius' Meditations has this
| description of "dementia".
|
| ... If dementia sets in, there will be no failure of such
| faculties as breathing, feeding, imagination, desire: before
| these go, the earlier extinction is of one's proper use of
| oneself, one's accurate assessment of the gradations of duty,
| one's ability to analyse impressions, one's understanding of
| whether the time has come to leave this life - these and all
| other matters which wholly depend on trained calculation. So we
| must have a sense of urgency, not only for the ever closer
| approach of death, but also because our comprehension of the
| world and our ability to pay proper attention will fade before we
| do.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| There is evidence that cardiovascular exercise results in
| neurogenesis which results in lower incidences of dementia in
| older adults.
|
| This is speculation but it wasn't until the past 70 or so years
| that large amounts of people were able to be sedentary.
|
| I know the "simple explanation for why everything is fucked up"
| answer is almost always wrong but I'm very convinced that lack of
| walking is a major contributor to all of this stuff.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Alzheimer's is a side effect of a sugar rich diet.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9099768/
| jjulius wrote:
| >Alzheimer's is a side effect of a sugar rich diet.
|
| Careful with those absolutes. That linked article overall
| discusses obesity as a likely risk factor for it. On the sugar
| point, "sucrose" only appears once in the piece and the
| referenced study involved mice, not humans.
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