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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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's anywhere as widespread as you think it is, or why it's relevant to this apart from "it too involves medicine" and, well, people are researching medical interventions longitudinally full-time, so I suspect it'll be analysed accordingly. Interesting that you've prejudged it to be clearly bad, I'd wait for scientific evidence of that.

Scientific evidence is already emerging: https://archive.is/lUUQi Big time issues with bone density. People in their 20s breaking hips and developing osteoporosis. That's not okay.

That makes sense.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not a vegan, but I eat a lot of vegetables, most vegetables, if prepared correctly are delicious, there are a lot of traditional dishes in every cuisine in the world that take absolutely no animal products on their preparation and have a wonderful taste and aroma. I see no reason to eat those franken-foods just because you're a vegan, a lot of them have strange additives to make them taste and look like animal s…

> I see no reason to eat those franken-foods just because you're a vegan, a lot of them have strange additives to make them taste and look like animal stuff, it is simply not worth the risk to eat them IMHO.

"Just Egg" is mung bean and canola oil. You can DIY it for cheaper, it's like buying pancake mix. There's always a few strange additives for these sorts of products (improve shelf life, anti-caking, emulsion, whatever), but that's not a vegan-specific thing.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to declare your issues before (or at least after) you give blood. Kinda messed up that whoever donated that blood didn't report it. Then again, I'm glad the blood was available...

We can't conclude that the donor had an egg allergy. The immune system is complicated as hell, it could be the case that he had some weird protein circulating on his blood that was recognized by her immune system, and by chance this protein was structurally close enough to some egg protein that now eggs trigger an immune response on her.

Worth noting that the most prevalent protein in blood is albumin, and the major protein in eggs is, yep, albumin.

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

#124
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.

This finding definitely supports a brain protein hypothesis, but it could just as easily point to tau protein as amyloid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399531/

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

#125
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could they test the donor first for these proteins or whatever is causing it?

We probably could, but only after we'd figure out what exactly is causing it.

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

#127
post #112
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…

> w/ mice Is this a special kind of mouse?

"w/" is an abbreviation for "with". "w/ mice" should be read as "with mice".

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

#128
post #38

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.

Eggs or chicken eggs? Could always use duck eggs.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that we've been lumping multiple different types of cognitive decline as a single disease.

Can’t you make a definitive diagnosis from an autopsy. Could be that multiple diseases lead to the same findings in the autopsy. While someone is alive a diagnosis of Alzheimers is more of a diagnosis of elimination. There are several drugs that can be used to slow the progression and I assume that those have a role to play in solidifying the diagnosis.

That ventures wildly into whether the realm of physicalism explains malaises that happen in the "consciousness" realm. spooky

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

#130

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…

>Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different body, it seems like you are introducing a lot more uncertainty and risk

But this always had to be weighed against the risks of not getting the transfusion. Typically the consequences of not getting a transfusion when it is medically indicated is pretty severe.

We don't really need to worry about unlikely not-yet-understood edge cases that happen years later from procedures we've done millions of times. We gotta gotta about blood loss.

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