51–60 of 247 posts
Why isn't the procedure used anymore, since they stopped using it before this was discovered?
Did you even try reading? It's made super clear at the start.
I've often wondered if Alzheimer's is actually novel instances of prion disease. For instance, Kuru was developed within I think a handful of generations in a population of ~20,000 with limited opportunities for transmission (only transmitted when someone dies and their family eats their brain). If the base incidence rate for a novel prion is that high, can you explain Alzheimer's as just that? It would be sad news f…
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.
Not sure why scientists has to pin point a single cause where as you have different vectors that can cause the same disease is also plausible
Yet many other correlations are even hazier than AB.
I've often wondered if Alzheimer's is actually novel instances of prion disease. For instance, Kuru was developed within I think a handful of generations in a population of ~20,000 with limited opportunities for transmission (only transmitted when someone dies and their family eats their brain). If the base incidence rate for a novel prion is that high, can you explain Alzheimer's as just that? It would be sad news f…
it’s almost certainly not, or you would see epidemiological evidence for chains of transmission. prion diseases require contact transmission which is all but absent from the alzheimer’s story.
Afaict, this is not an entirely new finding. For example, this page ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07771-6 ) references a 2018 article about the issue of Alzheimer's being transmitted (or rather "seeded") through growth hormone extracted from cadavers. Perhaps the new article provides additional evidence or perhaps the other article only suspected a casual link and this one proves that there is one. I h…
It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
> The far wider relevance of prion mechanisms was first exemplified with the discovery of yeast prions but has also widened considerably with the recognition that the more common human neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, involve accumulation and spread of assemblies of misfolded host proteins in what is often described as a ‘prion-like’ fashion with experimental transmission of relevant pathology in primates or mouse models. However, the importance for human disease was unclear until the recognition of human transmission of amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology via iatrogenic routes after prolonged incubation periods, causing iatrogenic cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and raising the possibility that iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease may occur at even longer latency.
[flagged]
Interesting that you've prejudged it to be clearly bad, I'd wait for scientific evidence of that.
[flagged]
Slightly more clickbaity title than the BBC's "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases"[0] which also says "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious - you cannot catch it from contact with people who have it... The researchers say all of the people in their study had been treated as a child with cadaver-derived human growth hormone, or c-hGH, that was contaminated with brain proteins that…
The really interesting thing here is that Alzheimer's seems to be transmissible from person to person via biological material. The BBC headline you quoted, "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases", totally buries the lede and is borderline misleading.