101–110 of 247 posts
I remember reading about cattle rearing practices a while ago that might be responsible for some prion related diseases. Can’t remember the exact source. These things get you from entirely unrelated sources.
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.
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Multiple pathways could lead to the disease. It's entirely possible that a metabolic dysfunction or viral origin causes immune dysfunction and the downstream dysregulation, misfolding, amyloid/tau signals, etc. There might be multiple entry points to causing this disease.
That might be true, but I don't think this makes the conclusion any more compelling because it now fails Occam's razor. Chances are greater the conclusion is simply incorrect.
In this case we don't have any explanations to compare yet, just suggestive lines of research. So it's premature to bring out the razor.
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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 t…
You could also explain the age skewness by allowing for the fact that it takes time for the prions to replicate to the point that you notice symptoms.
Other I think this would predict: lifetime exposure to mutagens is a predictor for Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is more heritable from the mother than the father.
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Generally, I think if a patient needs blood transfusions there's a bigger and more immediate life-and-death problem right there. I think allergies would be preferable to death. Is my understanding correct? I hope blood transfusion hasn't become a routine procedure these days.
You get a blood transfusion for any major surgery.
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…
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You get a blood transfusion for any major surgery.
Makes me wonder if there is any possibility to give blood in the lead-up to your surgery, such that you're transfused with your own blood?
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Generally, I think if a patient needs blood transfusions there's a bigger and more immediate life-and-death problem right there. I think allergies would be preferable to death. Is my understanding correct? I hope blood transfusion hasn't become a routine procedure these days.
I don't think GC was suggesting that we stop blood transfusions, but rather that we do better tracking to improve our understanding in a way that normally would be unethical (if not for the fact that, as you say, blood transfusions are a life-saving intervention).
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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.
Well, the boffins figured out somehow that if you get a blood transfusion from an Opossum you become immune to all snake venom for a while. (Seems wikipedia removed this factoid now... and other sources state "most" snake venom) I assume they tested on animals, not humans.