It seems like they killed the gut bacteria with antibiotics, then transferred the bacteria from alzheimer's patients, causing symptoms. I wonder if a second gut transplant from non-alzheimer's patients would reverse it?
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Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#102If you look at the scatter graphs, it's not terribly impressive. Lots of overlap, and most of the results show no difference. The one that does show a large difference still has a lot of overlap in the scatter graph, and it seems to be some outliers that bring down the mean value.
It's kind of an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. This isn't that.
What interests me more is why HN users keep posting this study, and voting it to the top of the home page.
Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#103Do we know which bacteria/microbiota is causing this? Any benefits from taking probiotics?
I believe there’s some benefit from boulardi yeast but I don’t know the reference except that it’s part of the bredeson protocol. Smells nice in a cleaning vinegar solution though.
Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#104Microbiome researcher here. As usual, when a microbiome paper reaches HN, I emerge to urge caution. You should be extremely skeptical of the larger conclusions drawn from this paper. The biology of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is poorly understood, and the contribution of dietary and microbiome factors are extremely unclear. I think you should treat the evidence from this paper (and shared in this thread) as more like "f…
Thanks for that great write-up. I wonder if there are microbiome studies with actually large effect sizes in diseases which we do not typically associate with infectious factors (e.g. diabetes).
Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#105If you look at the scatter graphs, it's not terribly impressive. Lots of overlap, and most of the results show no difference. The one that does show a large difference still has a lot of overlap in the scatter graph, and it seems to be some outliers that bring down the mean value. It's kind of an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. This isn't that. What interests me more is why HN users keep p…
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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#106It seems like they killed the gut bacteria with antibiotics, then transferred the bacteria from alzheimer's patients, causing symptoms. I wonder if a second gut transplant from non-alzheimer's patients would reverse it?
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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#107Do we know which bacteria/microbiota is causing this? Any benefits from taking probiotics?
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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#108Original published: https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/b...
Doesn't look very impressive. Lots of overlap in the scatter graphs, and no mention of whether they corrected for multiple comparisons. Overall it looks like the typical breathless press release clickbait that HN users seem to constantly post here.
They did correct for multiple testing - "P-values were multiple-test corrected
using the Benjamini-Hochberg False Discovery Rate (FDR) procedure and a cutoff of 0.1 was applied to select the differentially abundant genera". However, they used Wilcoxon test which has unacceptably high FDR [1].
Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#109If you look at the scatter graphs, it's not terribly impressive. Lots of overlap, and most of the results show no difference. The one that does show a large difference still has a lot of overlap in the scatter graph, and it seems to be some outliers that bring down the mean value. It's kind of an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. This isn't that. What interests me more is why HN users keep p…
almost everyone on HN is interested in biology and especially biohacking but does not actually realise they have none of the necessary expertise to judge claims coming from that field; the level of discourse on these topics is sometimes worse than what I spot on reddit
Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota
#110I had to triple check the date because I was pretty sure that this was known before. Maybe it is simply the confirmation aspect of it? Edit: > Our findings reveal for the first time, that Alzheimer’s symptoms can be transferred to a healthy young organism via the gut microbiota, *confirming a causal role* of gut microbiota in Alzheimer’s disease ... From: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/kimgreen/bio/glucocorticoids-a..…
"You could sum up Alzheimer's as: Diet/Lifestyle + a congenital form of Cushing's syndrome and you have increasing glucocorticoids which imply downregulation of the PVN, less progesterone and low levels of Prolactin reducing oligodendrocyte reducing myelin sheaths. Add in APOE e4 without choline in the diet and you have accumulation of lipids to round it all out." Can someone translate this into plain English?
There are decades, billions of dollars, and millions of man-hours of research on Alzheimer's.
It's safe to say a paragraph on hackernews saying "oh it's just X", no matter how stuffed with scientific words, does not sum it all up.