Can someone with a better background tell me if this is a game changer? I thought the consensus was that Alzheimer's probably had a few potential causes.
Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
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Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#12How does this mesh with the gingivitis correlation?
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#13[deleted]
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#14Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies. They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to notice the same due to limitations of peer review in catching results that were created by some form of chance.
This result looks very exciting and if it replicates and is built upon in five years' time then we can all talk about it then, you know?
I note that Science Translational Medicine's impact factor is not awesome. But even that doesn't mean much to me: lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact especially likely to collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#15A good primer on prions: http://www.prionalliance.org/2013/11/26/what-are-prions/
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#16How does a protein come to be misfolded? Is it a random mutation that happens to be self-propagating? Is it different between alzheimers and other ones like mad cow?
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#17This is an absolutely astonishing game-changer for Alzheimer's research. The scientist who discovered prions (and got a Nobel prize for it) now has convincing evidence that the proteins that cause Alzheimer's are themselves prions. Amazing, scary, and hopeful all at the same time.
To someone with minimal background in biology, prions are a fascinating and terrifying phenomenon right out of speculative fiction. Absolutely amazing and scary.
Prions remind me of ice-nine.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#18This is an absolutely astonishing game-changer for Alzheimer's research. The scientist who discovered prions (and got a Nobel prize for it) now has convincing evidence that the proteins that cause Alzheimer's are themselves prions. Amazing, scary, and hopeful all at the same time.
Well, when you’re an authority on prions everything looks like a prion disease.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#19Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…
> lately it feels like _Science_ and _Nature_ are in fact especially likely to collect results that are very exciting and also wrong, because they feel like they're the best journals so their results should be surprising.
I believe this is accurate on all counts.
Slate Star Codex put the issue fairly pithily: there's only one way to get surprising-if-true results that isn't surprising.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#20Does this mean that inflammation of the brain is to be ruled out as a cause?
cheesymuffin's comment is downvoted, but I think he's on to something. It would be very odd to consider inflammation of the brain to be a cause of any problem, because inflammation is a symptom of something else.