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Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

medicalxpress.com

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Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#181

Post by amanaplanacanal »

cies wrote: post #129
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming this is a modern disease? Why? Folks have had different sorts of dementia for centuries, though. We simply didn't have the knowledge nor the tools to differentiate one from another and tended to call things by different names. Not as many people die young now, either, so more folks are actually getting diseases that present in old age. You can't observe many old folks if there aren't any, and you won…

It's not a modern disease, it simply has exploded in occurrence. This explosion is modern. This is likely due to our diet. There's a book called "the blue zones" that dives into healthy diets and lifestyles that have historically helped people grow old. > Food of yesteryear wasn't really better/healthier than now. Not all food was. But Okinawans do pretty well for a long, long time.

I’m not so convinced about “blue zones”. A lot of longevity claims seem to disappear once modern record keeping and birth certificates come into play.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#182

Post by patel011393 »

irjustin wrote: post #33
patel011393 wrote: post #16

Be careful interpreting this study summary. The article's peer reviews (on PubPeer) list a few analytic issues that call the findings into question: https://pubpeer.com/publications/59F515775D10D854ABB7F4B31D4...

Hrmmmmm the controls for the first 2 graphs appear to be the same and they're called out for it [0]. But it could very well be that they're supposed to be the same? Authors may just need to better highlight why the same control is allowed to be use for comparing 2 different result sets. [0] https://pubpeer.com/publications/59F515775D10D854ABB7F4B31D4...

Yep, but other issues are discussed too. Suspicion is warranted, though signs of errors and fraud require even deeper investigation.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#183

Post by burjui »

jlhf wrote: post #110
brettv2 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen anyone who's obese and having a diet that made me go "huh that's odd how can they be obese?" Your question isn't refuting OPs claim: the people you are observing to be fat are fat because of their carb/sugar intake, not fat. i.e. if you just fed someone large amounts of protein and fat they would be lean; it is the sugar and carbs that make them fat.

No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.

Lack of carbs supresses appetite, JFYI.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#184

Post by atombender »

hilbert42 wrote: post #154
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #21

As a former Alzheimer's researcher, this is a big fucking deal. It puts together a lot of clues (APOE risk, microglia) and finds a theory that makes a lot of sense. All around the world, there are labs pulling late nights trying to figure out how to drug this.

"Back when Alzheimer's disease was first identified by Alois Alzheimer, he noted that in addition to the plaques and tau buildup, there was also a buildup of fat droplets in brain cells. Since that time, little effort has been made to determine whether they might be the cause of the disease." I'm not medical researcher but I find this statement incredible. It's over 120 years since Alzheimer did this work. Why the fu…

Medicine is hard. Unlike, say, physics, you cannot experiment on people except in very specific circumstances. Rats, mice, chimps etc. aren't people, so researchers work on "animal models", but in many cases you're just giving lab rats an Alzheimer-like disease and curing them of an Alzheimer-like disease, which is nothing like curing actual Alzheimer in actual humans. (Yes, animal models often involve inducing a "fake" disease in animals — testing treatments for psoriasis involve giving imiquimod to genetically modified rats, for example. This activates some of the same immune pathways, but it ain't psoriasis.) Alzheimer is particularly hard because we can't really study what's going on in the brain while people are alive, and when they're dead and can be dissected, we can only see the remnants of that activity.

If science has been hyped up too much, I think we have the media to blame, not scientists. Media turns very early, pre-clinical, merely promising research into headlines like "Could This Promising New Discovery Be a Cure For X?" Meanwhile, tons of progress is being made; you probably just don't notice it. Monoclonal antibodies (like Humira) for autoimmune disorders like Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, arthritis, psoriasis, etc. have been complete game changers for people with autoimmune illnesses that involve the overexpression of certain cytokines like TNF. Same with JAK inhibitors and PDE4 inhibitors. There are tons of things with good treatments now, but you probably don't hear about them because it's not that sexy and therefore not covered by media. As for cancer, it's not a single, monolithic disease, but a whole lot of different ones (melanoma, lymphoma, leukemia etc. all have different causes). Huge leaps have been made with some (like melanoma), and for many cancers a lot more people are surviving than the 1950s when chemotherapy was in its infancy (methotrexate, the first chemo agent, was discovered in the late 40s) and most attempts to treat cancer involved surgery.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#185

Post by funcDropShadow »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #169
_heimdall wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calorie hypothesis isn't the most likely from all the research I've done. The calorie as a unit of measure doesn't even make much sense IMO. A calorie is measured by burning food a specific distance away from a specific amount of water and measuring how much the water temperature rises. It's based on an assumption that the body uses all energy in the food the same, and that fire is analogous to the complex proces…

Which the body basically is. Anyone who tracks their calories daily for a long period of time will see that when they eat more they gain weight, when they eat less they loose weight. Like I said above, there are other aspects that can factor but “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain (applying the broad brush of the 80:20 rule)

> “calories in calories out” accounts for 80% of weight loss and weight gain

That is simply not true for people that are already obese.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#186

Post by saintlunaire »

smeej wrote: post #133
mobilejdral wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask you your thoughts about CYP21A2? Been studying folks with only one working CYP21A2 due to the resulting atypical adrenal function and I noticed that their dna also contains all the genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's (some are beneficial in this case). Inquiring about the family tree of the single CYP21A2 I have yet to have someone tell me of an ancestor that died of Alzheimer's. But the family mem…

I'm really uninformed about this topic, but I'll second the request for info about this! I have Alzheimer's on three sides of my family (really banking on the fact that I take after the 4th grandmother who was sharp as a tack till 98), and while I haven't ever looked into a diagnosis of hypercorticolism, thanks to very early (in utero/neonate) trauma, my parasympathetic nervous system never learned how to clear corti…

May I ask how you found out your nervous system has trouble clearing cortisol? Is there a test you can do? How are you remediating it?

I also have Alzheimer’s in the family and this hypercortisolism discussion feels familiar to me.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#187

Post by earthling8118 »

francisofascii wrote: post #165
simonbarker87 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People get fat through consuming more calories than they burn for energy during the day. There are extra but around the edges but no matter the ratio of fat to carbs to protein, if someone consumes (food or liquid) 3,000 calories a day but only burns 2,500 calories a day then a decent portion of that 500 cal difference will get stored as body fat. You could eat 0 calories of fat but if that total of carbs and protein…

But it does depend on the type of foods. For example, let's take a serving of almonds listed at 160 calories. Your body may only absorb 120 (depends on the person) of those calories to be burned due to the fiber in the almonds. While foods with sugar and little fiber, you get close to 100% of the listed calories.

This is counter to the point that was made regarding fat. The almonds have a higher ratio of fat to other macros.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#188

Post by jlhf »

burjui wrote: post #183
jlhf wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they wouldn’t stay lean. If you fed someone more calories than their body uses to maintain its current weight, they would get fat eventually. Regardless of whether they eat carbs, fat or protein.

Lack of carbs supresses appetite, JFYI.

I never claimed otherwise and it does not negate my point.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#189

Post by daddylongstroke »

smeej wrote: post #133
mobilejdral wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask you your thoughts about CYP21A2? Been studying folks with only one working CYP21A2 due to the resulting atypical adrenal function and I noticed that their dna also contains all the genetic variants associated with Alzheimer's (some are beneficial in this case). Inquiring about the family tree of the single CYP21A2 I have yet to have someone tell me of an ancestor that died of Alzheimer's. But the family mem…

I'm really uninformed about this topic, but I'll second the request for info about this! I have Alzheimer's on three sides of my family (really banking on the fact that I take after the 4th grandmother who was sharp as a tack till 98), and while I haven't ever looked into a diagnosis of hypercorticolism, thanks to very early (in utero/neonate) trauma, my parasympathetic nervous system never learned how to clear corti…

Assuming your psychological state of mind and your heart health is relatively good, whole body cold water plunges/swimming 3 times a week for 2-3 minutes, has been shown (in relatively small studies) to have many positive effects on various endocrine system functions, including cortisol levels.

Re: Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests

#190

Post by ajdude »

caymanjim wrote: post #72
ianai wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fat is it? Like is it possible to avoid by avoiding too much fat?

The idea that eating fat leads to higher body fat is the most dangerously-wrong health misconception in history.

There are exceptions, I have the APOE 4/4 variant gene which results in my metabolism not dealing with saturated fat as well, and eating saturated fat does end up raising my bad cholesterol among a bunch of other terrible side effects

perhaps not coincidentally, this variant also comes with a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease

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