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Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

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Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#101

Whatever, it's never Lupus.

Came here for the House comment. Amazing how that show owned this word

I have a t-shirt with that comment. A few years later, a family member gets diagnosed with Lupus. I stopped wearing the t-shirt.

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good post. One small correction: Tapinarof isn't an AhR inhibitor, it's an AhR activator, an agonist. Interestingly, tapinarof is a natural product -- a sort of bacterially-modified stilbene, a chemical cousin of resveratrol and pterostilbene -- and several other natural products also activate AhR. (Though perhaps not exactly in the same way.) The most potent and readily available of these is probably 3,3'-diindolylm…

Ah, thanks. I assumed tapinarof was an inhibitor, as the papers on its mechanism describe it as downregulating cytokines. It appears the exact mechanism isn't quite clear. Bissonette et al 2021 [1]: Tapinarof was found to bind directly to AhR, resulting in downregulation of inflammatory cytokines, regulation of skin barrier protein expression, and antioxidant activity ... In a T-cell polarization assay, tapinarof mar…

This open-access paper is pretty interesting with respect to mechanisms of action and how tapinarof differs from other stilbenes and AhR agonists: https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(17)31543-9/full...

And, yeah, good point re coal tar. AhR was once thought to be a toxin or junk receptor that activated liver enzymes for clearance of environmental waste and other chemical byproducts. The constitutive androstane receptor (CAR) and pregnane X receptor (PXR) were, at one time, thought to be very similar. That might still be the case with respect to PXR and CAR, but I'm thinking that the way to bet is that there's more to them than was once thought...

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#103
post #90
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If these toxins build up in animal cells - why would you eating meat (that must then have a much higher concentration) not expose you to the same toxins?

The trick is you must eat meat that only ate meat!

It's meat all the way down!

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#107

Autoimmune diseases, of which lupus is but one of many, are essentially black boxes. It’s proven extraordinarily difficult to develop therapies in this area. As such, this is great news. Hopefully this research will encourage pharmaceutical and biotech companies to invest more resources into translating research findings into effective therapies. I haven’t read the paper yet, so I can’t comment on how this discovery…

Yes, for Hashimoto's thyroiditis there seem to be some approaches: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38621508/ Let's see how this plays out.

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many ME experts are doing both. RECOVER is considering adding ME/CFS arms to its huge clinical trial platform. UCSF just added ME/CFS as a priority in their LIINC program. SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics won’t work on both but immune cell based ones may given they haven’t been tested in either yet. Both suggest a root cause of persistent viral antigen. Time will tell what works here.

RECOVER is the biggest scam when it comes to research unfortunately. 90% of their studies are focusing on various form of "brain exercises", CBT therapy and exercise therapy. Things that are not only proven to not work, but actually proven to harm people with ME/CFS (of which long covid patients make up a large amount).

They fund and do a lot of work beyond the horrible choices for initial RCTs. This fall we should hopefully see actual pharmaceutical interventions and a plethora of research they’ve been publishing.

The more important parts of their programs are the omics and tissue biopsy programs.

May they hopefully turn the ship…

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a good feeling we're going to make a fairly big impact on cancer in our lifetimes with mRNA and other new discoveries in our lifetime. Autoimmune issues I'm feeling much less confident about. It seems like so many of the therapies are "turn down the immune system". I wish there was wider study into autoimmune derived mental health complications too. Maybe I'm totally wrong on this (and I'm very OK to be proven…

There is evidence that inflammation is among the causes of depression: https://wapo.st/3xHLze1 > pro-inflammatory drugs can induce people to become depressed, which suggests a causative link. In one seminal study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Miller and his colleagues conducted a double-blind study of 40 cancer patients undergoing treatment with interferon-alpha, an inflammatory cytokine. > Though…

However the causality is not clear. Inflammatory agents cause depression. And most depressed people have higher pro-inflammatory markers. It could also be the case that the inflammation is a result of something completely different.

Re: Scientists discover a cause of lupus, possible way to reverse it

#110
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this why something like vitamin C can help with depression?

What the mechanism?

„Vitamin C supplementation attenuates the oxidative stress (lipid peroxidation) and inflammatory response (IL-6) to a single bout of exercise.“[1]

Vitamin C is essential and gets consumed by the body and needs to be replenished. For example during sickness the Vitamin C consumption is higher which could lead quickly to low levels.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32162041/

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