Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 247 posts

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

#221

Post by rantallion »

angiosperm wrote: post #217
Zigurd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prions are exactly the tiny, hard to detect things that could make Alzheimers transmissible. There are likely to remain many questions to resolve, but this sure suggests a line of inquiry: Is Alzheimer's one distinct disease? Can a prion be isolated as the cause? Can a diagnostic test be designed that detects this prion? Etc.

There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection. Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to be very common. But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem negligent. (Which they are.)

> There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins.

Except that there's increasing evidence that specific proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of dementia.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/

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

#222

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> it seems like you are introducing a lot more uncertainty and risk

Of course. What matters though isn't the absolute risk, it's whether such treatments provide enough benefits to outweigh those risks. Not dying outweighs pretty much everything.

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

#224

Post by jonp888 »

bregma wrote: post #183
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 wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. Back in the early 1990s my wife worked in epidemiology studies at the national blood agency in our country. There was a lot of work to be done since at the time being a hemophiliac and receiving blood products meant a good chance of dying from AIDS or non-A non-B hepatitis (now known as Hep C). The agency did not test eac…

Until 2023 male blood donors in Germany were still asked "have you had sex with a man in the last 4 months?" As an exclusion criterium.

Donors who lived in Britain in the 90's are still banned due to the Lack of a Test which can identify 'Mad Cow Disease'.

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

#226

Post by angiosperm »

rantallion wrote: post #221
angiosperm wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection. Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to be very common. But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem negligent. (Which they are.)

> There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. Except that there's increasing evidence that specific proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of dementia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/

It is possible that Alzheimer's is purely a matter of aberrant proteins. That would be valid conclusion if the evidence turned out to support it. But it is not a valid assumption under any circumstance.

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

#227

Post by martin82 »

Guys, don't get distracted by all the new mysterious causes of Alzheimers.

Alzheimers is "brain diabetes". You get it from a lifetime of eating carbs and developing insulin resistance.

Big pharma and big agriculture will never want you to know this, so it will take years before this becomes common knowledge.

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

#228

Post by elcook4000 »

tim333 wrote: post #178
elcook4000 wrote: post #143

This is really fascinating, horrifying and hopeful at the same time. It makes sense that some neurodegenerative diseases with unknown etiologies are caused by prions or prion-like proteins. It could be fruitful to study the rate of Alzheimer's among nursing assistants who work in elder care. I found a few resourcas stating a higher rate for caregiver's in general along with nurses. I have thought decreased immune fun…

From my limited understanding the blood brain barrier doesn't really stop things. However it is difficult to transmit from one person / animal to another usually resulting from things like transplants or being injected in.

I just did a brief search and found this article related to the increased permeability of the blood brain barrier with aging.

https://immunityageing.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1...

Research into chemical agents that induce or inhibit this would also be of interest.

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

#229

Post by carlmr »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #164
jychang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

In that case scarring/inflammation might trigger the Alzheimer's though. The interesting part in this article is that the growth hormone was not injected into brain tissue I assume.

Post reply on HN