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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

#161

Post by m-i-l »

jessriedel wrote: post #81
caconym_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That's right. Living in the UK and taking an interest in popular science during the "mad cow disease crisis"[0], I had been aware that prion diseases can be transmitted in humans if (for example) you eat (infected) brains of your dead ancestors[1], but the headline as originally submitted ("Scientists document first-ever transmitted Alzheimer's cases") did suggest to me that we might be at the start of something altogether new and much more alarming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)

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

#162

Post by ultra_nick »

yungporko wrote: post #154
caesil wrote: post #140

This is one of the reasons that, despite no direct evidence of harm, I will only ever take marine collagen instead of bovine collagen. Do not fuck with the possibility of ingesting cow nervous system tissue, let alone human.

why is cow or hunan nervous system tissue particularly dangerous? what animal is marine collagen from and why is it less dangerous?

Prions.

Non-mammal prions have a different enough shape to avoid breaking mammalian biomechanisms.

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

#163

Post by jychang »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #57
diob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.

Yeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint: > 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 as…

The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein

Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.

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

#164

Post by DoingIsLearning »

jychang wrote: post #163
EdwardDiego wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint: > 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 as…

The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.

Perhaps a first pass research question is:

Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population?

Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.

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

#165

Post by theshackleford »

bobsmooth wrote: post #97
kccqzy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No.

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

#166

Post by sschueller »

jokoon wrote: post #52

weird that the bulk of patients are in france and UK, does that indicate diet?

Interesting since the UK was part of the huge Mad Cow (BSE a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob) disaster[1] in Europe back in the 90s which introduced new rules in Switzerland requiring marking origin and banning certain feeding methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak

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

#167

Post by abirch »

palijer wrote: post #130
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…

>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 ed…

Yes, usually if you need a blood transfusion there are bigger issues.

Please remember to ask your doctor about autologous transfusion, where you bank your own blood before a planned procedure.

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

#168

Post by tim333 »

jychang wrote: post #163
EdwardDiego wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint: > 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 as…

The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.

There are quite a lot of diseases where a prion like mechanism is suspected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases

ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper:

>recent cultured cell line and animal model studies suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to neighboring cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/

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

#169

Post by timschmidt »

Cpoll wrote: post #122
elzbardico wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wha…

Seed oils like canola aren't great for health. They're fairly new to the food stream (only widely available since about 1900), heavily processed, and chock full of compounds the plant was making to protect it's seeds, many of which cause inflammation and other negative health effects. Olive oil, coconut oil, and animal fats have all been in use longer, and seem to be better for us. Avocado oil also seems to be decent, though it can be challenging to find quality unadulterated oils of any kind.

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

#170

Post by timschmidt »

ikrenji wrote: post #107
q1w2 wrote: 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…

those tissues are unlikely to carry prions. prions are concentrated in the brain.

Unlikely != zero risk, and concentrated != isolated?
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