Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 139 posts

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#61

Post by imdsm »

andy_ppp wrote: post #57
bonesinger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the term "inability to process carbs and sugar" is misleading and totally not the same thing as insulin resistance. Its generally assumed that processing carbs is the act of digestion. You're using the word processed in the wrong situation here. EDIT: Also you can still process carbs, you just can't utilize glucose in the blood as a diabetic.

Okay, so if I replace "process" with "utilise" we are good?

Yeah I'm with you on this. If someone assumes by one word you mean another word, and by using the other word, you're wrong, well, I think their logic is flawed.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#62

Post by imdsm »

andy_ppp wrote: post #60
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So insulin resistance isn't in some way related to chronic elevated levels of insulin? It's also interesting that insulin resistance is reversible by simply eating less carbs. But clearly, diabetes has nothing to do with carbs :-)

I'm off to have a Jam sandwich on some nice white bread. Edit: I applaud the downvoter of this comment.

Make sure it's a brioche bun.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#64

Post by tcj_phx »

iaskwhy wrote: post #26
FroshKiller wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's right.

Adding to this, dementia might be a "side" effect of the medication for the muscles' rigidity. It's hard to explain but eventually there comes a time when you need to opt between not being able to move or take the medication and start having more and more frequent surreal visions. My grandfather survived a few cancer appearances but during the last surgery to remove some cancer lumps he woke up as a completely new pe…

> He was pretty "normal" before the surgery but after it he couldn't walk and thought the hospital staff attacked him with dogs during the night.

Apparently delirium is a common side effect of whatever they do in hospitals. I came across this link last month:

"Delirium: A Surprising Side Effect of Hospital Stays -- Often misdiagnosed as dementia, it can cause hallucinations and delusions" - http://www.nextavenue.org/delirium-a-surprising-side-effect-...

If you're lucky they'll feed you coconut oil (short saturated fatty acids are easily burned in the cells for energy) and the dementia will pass. If you're not lucky they'll give you "anti-psychotic" drugs to sedate you, or other interventions that ruin the metabolism. Many treatments have the side effect of ensuring the patient will never recover.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#65

Post by charlieflowers »

peteretep wrote: post #11
simonh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father suffered from the disease and passed away in October. Awful disease. This is great news, but it looks like any treatment based on this will still be quite some way off.

> but it looks like any treatment > based on this will still be > quite some way off I came away with the opposite impression. Wouldn't you just need a targetted antibiotic?

I also got the impression that the damage was done over years. Killing the bad bacteria now might not be enough to cure an existing case of Parkinsons.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#66

Post by fatdog »

fatdog wrote: post #39

There is related work on dementia as well, wish I could find it. Something to do with increasing dietary ketones (using oils) to make up for glucose processing issues in people who were long term pre-diabetic. It was a dinner conversation, where a guy was reasoning that some degenerative and autoimmune diseases were related to tissue starvation as a result of inhibited glucose processing, and he was using ketones (wi…

not to reply to own thread on theme, but want to also add ketogenic diet was also used for treating "epilepsy," now known as a general class of seizure disorders, which are related to many issues, among them brain lesions. I have zero medical background, and if you are searching on this stuff, my point is that beyond the political stuff, there is something up with sugar.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#67

Post by bonesinger »

andy_ppp wrote: post #57
bonesinger wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the term "inability to process carbs and sugar" is misleading and totally not the same thing as insulin resistance. Its generally assumed that processing carbs is the act of digestion. You're using the word processed in the wrong situation here. EDIT: Also you can still process carbs, you just can't utilize glucose in the blood as a diabetic.

Okay, so if I replace "process" with "utilise" we are good?

I guess, sorry if I am coming across as touchy. I'm a diabetic and there is a ton of misinformation out there about it!

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#68

Post by alex_hitchins »

trendia wrote: post #40
dtf wrote: post #31

Last year, there was an interesting story about a woman who could smell a certain odour that seemed to be given off by people with Parkinson's (primarily her husband). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-34583642

If it's ketones, then it would be easy to train a dog to detect it.

Is it ketones that animals pickup from cancer patients? I've heard of dogs able to 'sniff' out a cancer diagnoses.

Re: Parkinson’s disease ‘may start in gut’

#69

Post by Declanomous »

NPMaxwell wrote: post #52
apinstein wrote: post #33

My Dad was recently diagnosed. Very early stage. This is very interesting news. My take is that Parkinson's is a little like cancer in that it likely has multiple root causes that can injure the same part of the brain (substantia niagra) and cause the disease. My research for his case led me to vitamin k2 deficiency as a possible cause / complicating factor. There are some genetic models and mouse trials that show k2…

Would it help to record the tremor intensity while tracing a smoothly moving dot with his finger on a cell phone screen? And/or record the tremor while holding the phone and tracing along a line with a corner of the phone. I bet you could get pretty good at-the-moment measurement of the tremor. Combine that with graphing and a rolling average, and you might have a pretty clear picture.

I bet you could homebrew an electromyograph pretty easily. It probably wouldn't be particularly accurate, but you could probably achieve enough precision to provide repeatability and measure day-to-day variance.

Edit: Hackaday had an article about a simple EMG recently

https://hackaday.com/2016/11/20/emg-tutorial-lets-you-listen...

Post reply on HN