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Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

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Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#81

Post by DoreenMichele »

nikkwong wrote: post #79
flocial wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eat more curry is one. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/909678/dementia-cure-curcu...

Thank you.

Curry is anti-inflammatory. There are studies on how the Mediterranean diet helps protect against brain inflammation. They are usually about depression, not Alzheimer's, and they typically claim that consumption of olive oil and fresh fruits and veggies are big factors.

Those might provide clues for you to start your search.

When my dad had Alzheimer's, I think they also gave him a children's aspirin (or possibly some other otc med) daily to help reduce his issues and help keep him more manageable. That might be another thing you could look up.

I recall seeing a remark on HN about Bill Gates, Alzheimer's and walking, though I can't find a citation. I recall someone saying something like "It would be great to be able to tell my mom to walk more because Bill Gates said so."

Walking is something I know to be hugely beneficial to various things. I would absolutely look for research that connects walking and protection against dementia if it were me.

Best.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#82

Post by 14 »

extrapickles wrote: post #74
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quick turnover and higher profits Why would turnover increase profits for a nursing home?

Some also charge a $80k+ admittance fee. They try and make it sound nice by saying the fee is so they will never kick them out if they run out of money.

I would suspect there must be some fine print somewhere that states that you would be kicked out if you ran out of money eventually. The facility I worked at charged $4500 a month which was considered really cheap as another one near by had no problem charging $6500 a month but provided half the care my facility did, just a nicer setting along a lake with a beautiful view. At even $4500 a month it is $54,000 annually. I can also tell you things can move very slowly in the medical field for these elderly people so say if something big in the family did happen and they suddenly could not pay, that $80k would get eaten up very quickly as they tried to locate additional funds for that individual. The facility that I worked at only required a single months deposit. When people could not afford to pay my boss would often cut them deals to have them stay longer.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#83

Post by ksdale »

sandworm101 wrote: post #27
maxerickson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amusing thing about your "cynicism" here is that $200,000 would be a substantial savings compared to what happens now, never mind the huge value an effective treatment would provide. In the US, the government (and thus society at large) bears much of the cost: http://act.alz.org/site/DocServer/2012_Costs_Fact_Sheet_vers...

And you have fallen into a different statistics trap. The number that matters isn't the cost of treating the patient. What matters is the increased lifetime costs of a paticular disease over the average. We all have to die of something. Diseases like lung cancer are cheap. The patients are either cured or dead relatively quickly. Demential is slow. Costs pile on for decades, starting often with forced early retiremen…

I remember a professor talking about the tobacco industry trials and they were talking about damages that the tobacco companies should pay to the state for increased healthcare costs due to lung cancer, and he said that the supremely ironic thing was that people who die from lung cancer at 45 have much less lifetime medical spending than people who die from most everything else at old age. He said exactly what you did, that people forget we all die of something, and the older we get, the more likely we are to have repeated long hospital stays or need long term care.

Obviously that isn't to say it's good for people to die young from lung cancer, but analyzing anything medical from a money perspective is tricky.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#84

Post by jlg23 »

mabbo wrote: post #2

Alzheimer's is the cruelest of illnesses and the loved ones of the victims suffer as much as the victims. The allure of this theory, in my view, is that if you could somehow turn this into a treatment, people would give you whatever money you demanded for it. You want $200,000? We'll find it, somehow, just make Mom remember who I am, please.

This is not specific to Alzheimer but applies to the general concept of market-driven medical research.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#85

Post by colordrops »

eganist wrote: post #72
colordrops wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you explain the results: "Results: From 2005 through 2011, for the 24 anti-VZV vaccinated patients, the average number of herpes relapses decreased to 0, correlated with an increased anti-VZV antibody level and clinical recovery of all patients, whereas no improvement was observed for the 26 nonvaccinated herpes patients."

A cure for herpes means the excision of viral DNA from the infected cells. Herpes is one of those viruses that stays with a person for life by means of establishing persistence with DNA insertion. Because of this, any cure will probably rely on CRISPR/Cas9 or variants of this process. E.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29844277 What you're drawing attention to there, if I'm reading it correctly, is that the pre…

This isn't a rigorous scientific forum.

Definition of "cure":

verb 1. relieve (a person or animal) of the symptoms of a disease or condition. "he was cured of the disease" synonyms: heal, restore to health, make well/better; archaic: cleanse "after a long course of treatment, he was cured"

I'm referring to the colloquial usage of "cure", which is all anyone cares about in this context. Who cares if the DNA is there if the symptoms are completely gone?

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#86

Post by DenisM »

mrtnmcc wrote: post #68
narrator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone has been looking at TauRX's phase 3 trials[1], methylene blue is ridiculously cheap, has been around for 100 years and stops Alzheimers progression better than any other drug. Tau is working on a slightly modified form that is basically putting it in a capsule and they'll sell it for $50 a pill probably, but that's the only way that anyone will believe it actually works. Methylene blue is a potent antimicro…

Other studies of mild to moderate Alzheimer's patients showed no improvement with Methylene blue, https://www.alzforum.org/news/conference-coverage/first-phas... Also I'd generally be more skeptical as the green urine it produces could be a strong placebo enhancer that is hard to control against.

Monochromatic red light in the bathroom should take care of placebo problem? Or red glasses, something like that. Maybe artificial piss color.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#87

Post by ryandrake »

ksdale wrote: post #83
sandworm101 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have fallen into a different statistics trap. The number that matters isn't the cost of treating the patient. What matters is the increased lifetime costs of a paticular disease over the average. We all have to die of something. Diseases like lung cancer are cheap. The patients are either cured or dead relatively quickly. Demential is slow. Costs pile on for decades, starting often with forced early retiremen…

I remember a professor talking about the tobacco industry trials and they were talking about damages that the tobacco companies should pay to the state for increased healthcare costs due to lung cancer, and he said that the supremely ironic thing was that people who die from lung cancer at 45 have much less lifetime medical spending than people who die from most everything else at old age. He said exactly what you di…

Thy dystopian Logan's Run [1] featured a society optimized for total lifetime cost, where everyone gets euthanized at a certain age. Not sure we want to go that way :)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#88

Post by eganist »

colordrops wrote: post #85
eganist wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cure for herpes means the excision of viral DNA from the infected cells. Herpes is one of those viruses that stays with a person for life by means of establishing persistence with DNA insertion. Because of this, any cure will probably rely on CRISPR/Cas9 or variants of this process. E.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29844277 What you're drawing attention to there, if I'm reading it correctly, is that the pre…

This isn't a rigorous scientific forum. Definition of "cure": verb 1. relieve (a person or animal) of the symptoms of a disease or condition. "he was cured of the disease" synonyms: heal, restore to health, make well/better; archaic: cleanse "after a long course of treatment, he was cured" I'm referring to the colloquial usage of "cure", which is all anyone cares about in this context. Who cares if the DNA is there i…

Herpes sheds asymptomatically, and it can still infect neighboring cells as a result. Just because an outbreak isn't visible e.g. because the immune system counteracts it early on doesn't mean the virus isn't still spreading.

Like I said, unless the viral dna is excised, you'll always have it.

As an aside, you're aiming for the term "functionally cured." Since the virus could still shed... even that's not achieved here.

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#89

Post by entwife »

graeme wrote: post #4
eganist wrote: post #3

Prior discussions (not the same link) on HN, posted for reference because they touch on the past research that was previously posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17540094 (this is the parent link for the antiviral risk reduction study -- a good read, comments and source article) There's a decent amount of reading…

How would you know if you had HSV? My impression was that a lot of infections are so mild that those with them don't realize they had it.

Evidence of previous HSV infection can be obtained by a laboratory blood test for antibodies to HSV-1 and/or HSV-2 (IgG for past infections, IgM for more recent infections.)

Re: Infectious Theory of Alzheimer's Disease Draws Fresh Interest

#90

Post by xabuq »

subcosmos wrote: post #63
spraak wrote: post #49

Another theory is that Alzheimer's is a vascular disease [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6], i.e. atherosclerosis of the brain. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12480752 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24489130 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23239205 [4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20695015 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15699381 [6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23204143

This would make sense. HerpesVirus has been shown to cause atherosclerosis as well, in humans. The connection? Herpes binds to the APOE gene sitting on cholesterol-carrying LDL particles .... https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/cholesterol-have-we-shot-the-me... I spent 3 years in one of the nations top alzheimers centers. It is still shocking to me how some of the seasoned veteran professors in the field are both unfamilia…

So what's up with tangentially related associations like Parkinsons, Lewy Body dementia (see: Robin Williams) and also Chicken Pox and Shingles. Aren't these all a relatable set of problems, then?
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