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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

#81

Post by jessriedel »

caconym_ wrote: post #60
m-i-l wrote: post #6

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…

I didn't find it clickbaity at all. The contents of the article were exactly what I expected based on the headline, and I didn't know this was possible. 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 mislead…

My reading is that m-i-l is using "clickbaity" to mean "doesn't prevent all possible wrong conclusions one could draw from the headline". (In this case, the wrong conclusion would be thinking that because there exists cases of alzheimer being transmitted through some mechanism that Alzheimer was contagious.)

While it's certainly understandable that we are all tired of clickbait that purposefully misleads the reader, imo we should not overcorrect by demanding that headlines cannot be misinterpreted by arbitrarily ignorant readers.

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

#82

Post by BizarroLand »

m-i-l wrote: post #6

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…

I wonder if we will ever find methods of flushing the brain out or doing anything within the human brain that will allow us to defend against things like this.

I know our brains are very protected in our bodies and for good reason but I still wonder how far we will be able to go if we can ever safely and humanely bypass that.

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

#83

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

munificent wrote: post #23
jollyllama wrote: post #15

Why isn't the procedure used anymore, since they stopped using it before this was discovered?

Second paragraph of the article: >In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of protein into recipients’ brains. In some cases, it had induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD — a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years ago. In other words, it gave people mad cow disease.

Not “mad cow disease”, but CJD.

“Mad Cow Disease” specifically refers to the variant form that is said to have been caused by prions from infected animals turning up in beef products.

Though in fact all we know for sure about the link there is that it’s the same prion in the cattle and human cases; the suggestion that there’s a direct food chain connection is still only considered very likely, not proven.

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

#84

Post by bemusedthrow75 »

Reubend wrote: post #18
jollyllama wrote: post #15

Why isn't the procedure used anymore, since they stopped using it before this was discovered?

As the article says, there is now a synthetic hormone which is given to the patients. We don't need to extract the hormone from dead people anymore.

Yes, but that just would cause the derived product not to be needed, when it was actually actively banned because it was proven to have caused some cases of CJD.

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

#85

Post by jovial_cavalier »

karmajunkie wrote: post #53
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #17

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.

We don't eat the brains of people with Alzheimer's, so we don't see it transmit?

I know CWD transmits from pretty much any shedding of the animal, but is that necessarily universally true?

Can we map that onto human beings who practice hygeine and don't eat leaves that another human urinated on?

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

#87

Post by syndicatedjelly »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #72
axus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If your mom’s still around let her know about vegan egg alternatives!

Vegan egg tastes like butts

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

#88

Post by aeternum »

lostlogin wrote: post #40
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 "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells Maybe the Silicon Valley ‘blood boy’ can be brought to market.

I believe Ambrosia was the (real) startup that was the inspiration for that story arc.

Looks like they're still around but have pivoted to boring wearables and of course AI.

A supposed win for the FDA, but perhaps a loss to humanity since there does seem to be evidence that the idea actually worked.

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

#89

Post by karmajunkie »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #85
karmajunkie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't eat the brains of people with Alzheimer's, so we don't see it transmit? I know CWD transmits from pretty much any shedding of the animal, but is that necessarily universally true? Can we map that onto human beings who practice hygeine and don't eat leaves that another human urinated on?

consumption of neural tissue isn’t the only transmission vector though. (See TFA for an example, in fact.) If it were a prion disease, just the law of averages dictates that we’d see some transmission from things like organ transplants from pre-symptomatic carriers. There’s no evidence of that at all that i’m aware of. (disclaimer: I work at a startup in cognitive testing, so while i’m certainly not a researcher in the field, i do see quite a bit of research on dementia-adjacent diseases)

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

#90

Post by knodi123 »

foota wrote: post #68
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…

I guess if your brain proteins are mixing with someone elses you normally have a bigger issue.

I don't know where your neuro-jack is installed, but if it's not in the skull then I don't know how you even connect to the all-mind.
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