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Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

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Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#41

Post by q1w2 »

eigenvalue wrote: post #35

I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence. Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different bo…

Not only blood transfusions, but ligament/tendon transplants from cadavers are extremely common for people who tear their ACL.

It would be a disaster if this type of surgery also transmitted some prior/protein misfolding disease decades later. Millions would be impacted. The practice stared in the 1980s, but really only became popular in the early 2000s with the boom in arthroscopic surgery standardization.

Hopefully the blood-brain barrier prevents this.

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#43

Post by selcuka »

eigenvalue wrote: post #35

I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence. Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different bo…

> I've seen some interesting research about [...] the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells,

This is excellent material for the conspiracy theorists.

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#44

Post by caycep »

There is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e. one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc after subjects passed several years later and got autopsied, they found clumps of parkinsonian proteins (lewy bodies) on the histology slides of the implanted stem cells.

Similarly, there's some papers w/ mice w/ knockout Parkinsonian genes getting parkinsonian features and lewy bodies when injected w/ abnormal misfolded synuclein from another mouse.

What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#45

Post by caycep »

Mistletoe wrote: post #5
rajup wrote: post #4

My understanding was the beta-amyloid hypothesis itself is under some amount of scrutiny and may not truly explain Alzheimer's. Wonder if this finding adds more evidence for the amyloid hypothesis.

I thought CJD was caused by a prion. Was it in the growth hormone prep from the cadavers?

there's transmissible CJD, but most cases are a genetic version where you get the prions from your own cells and then it cascades, if I recall

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#46

Post by eigenvalue »

axus wrote: post #38
eigenvalue wrote: post #35

I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence. Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different bo…

My mom developed an allergy to eggs after a blood transfusion. She long regretted never being able to eat another chocolate eclair.

That’s nuts. Seems like researchers should look really closely at weird side effects of blood transfusions since these are effectively “natural experiments” that would be impossible or unethical to run normally.

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#47

Post by secondcoming »

caycep wrote: post #44

There is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e. one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc after subjects passed several yea…

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Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#48

Post by eigenvalue »

q1w2 wrote: post #41
eigenvalue wrote: post #35

I wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence. Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different bo…

Not only blood transfusions, but ligament/tendon transplants from cadavers are extremely common for people who tear their ACL. It would be a disaster if this type of surgery also transmitted some prior/protein misfolding disease decades later. Millions would be impacted. The practice stared in the 1980s, but really only became popular in the early 2000s with the boom in arthroscopic surgery standardization. Hopefully…

Oh man, I bet you’re right and enough time hasn’t gone by to see the fallout from it! I bet rich people will start bidding up tendons and ligaments from younger cadavers (probably mostly motorcycle accident victims). Although given that so many of those have toxoplasmosis, maybe that’s also not great…

Re: Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure

#49

Post by jurynulifcation »

secondcoming wrote: post #47
caycep wrote: post #44

There is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e. one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc after subjects passed several yea…

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