Having Alzheimer’s at 38 (2015)

Post by ddingus » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 3:03 AM UTC

aurbano wrote: post #82

ddingus wrote: post #40

I have tears. I fear this more than I realized before. I think I just need to say a few things. So they exist somewhere, because of that fear, anger and sadness brought to me by this story. I remember the day I woke up, and by that, I mean the difference between being that kid, experiencing, and who I am today. It happened for me in 2nd grade. End of year, and I realized I could no longer choose to read, it just happ…

Have you read “Buddhism, plain and simple”? We share many ideas and have gone through a similar awakening. As most of the people commenting here, I wish we could all gather around a coffee table to discuss that book and others... Please, if you haven’t read it, consider doing so :)

Post by anonymous2057 » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 3:21 AM UTC

mattigames wrote: post #49

entropy_ wrote: post #38

My wife's family has a different disease running through it, though one with very similar outcomes. Huntington's. It's genetic and dominant (so a parent having it means 50/50 for the children). Average age of onset is 38. Symptoms are a mixture of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (both dementia and motor control issues). Her uncle was diagnosed at 38, her mother at 50. I wasn't around for the first one, but have been ther…

Yeah the only end of it is gonna be when people with such diseases stop having children, but just pointing out such an obvious solution generates all kinds of scorn from the people you are talking to, they seem to immediately think of "eugenics" and every other bad word and imagine you running a concentration camp... and not just people voluntarily using birth control to avoid the suffering of their own offspring tha…

Post by st26 » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #100

st26 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all sunshine & roses. Here's a dark factoid for you- my memory is a bit fuzzy on when you chose mother's blood vs amniotic fluid sample for the test, but at the time I learned about all this, the odds of taking the amniotic fluid sample causing spontaneous abortion, were higher than the odds of the fetus having the more common trisomy conditions. For any particular fetus, the test was more risky than the disease.

It doesn't follow that the test is useless: you're still minimizing the number of people with genetic abnormalities, even if you're causing some spontaneous abortions along the way.

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #106

quotemstr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. We live in the future. Unfortunately, based on some quick reading, the technique is regulated in many areas and used only in cases where some specific genetic disease is suspected. This artificial limitation is a disgrace.

Creating hundreds of human beings and then discarding them is the actual disgrace.

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jul 09, 2018, 4:47 AM UTC

st26 wrote: post #86

m_mueller wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that currently just a matter of legality and cost? You can already test for trisomy syndromes by sequencing a bit of the mother's blood around week 10 and isolating the embryo's chromosomes statistically - that probably takes a very fault tolerant kind of sequencing, but throw in an order of magnitude more money or a couple more years of cost reductions and you're there.

Not all sunshine & roses. Here's a dark factoid for you- my memory is a bit fuzzy on when you chose mother's blood vs amniotic fluid sample for the test, but at the time I learned about all this, the odds of taking the amniotic fluid sample causing spontaneous abortion, were higher than the odds of the fetus having the more common trisomy conditions. For any particular fetus, the test was more risky than the disease.