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Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

kcl.ac.uk

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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#151
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is antibiotic marketing bs. There are antibiotic that harm pathogenic or prone-to-overgrowth bacteria harder than others, but they ALL lead to a state of dysbiosis and susceptibility to subsequent colonization/overgrowth/dysregulation And this is the exact reason whymost of the time, GI problems come back or are replaced with different symptoms after antibiotics, and why we need more Fecal Microbiota Transplant…

No, it isn't. The whole point of antibiotics for IBS treatment is that you already have an overgrowth, and you want to disrupt that and level the playing field. This is literally the reason I've been on short course antibiotics (<1 week or a single 4 tab dose) at different points, because it eliminates the constant bloating and gives probiotics a chance to work.

The exact reason why overgrowth happens is because an opportunistic strain takes advantage of a dysbiotic state - even if you suppress it with antibiotics, your gut still lacks the robustness of composition necessary to be resilient. In fact, no antibiotic is selective enough to not impoverish your microbiome.

Probiotics might help, but a few or a few dozen non-gut-sourced strains simply cannot compare to the hundreds present in healthy stool. The effects on microbiota-dependent conditions are often weak to none.

Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Unfortunately, the parent commenter is making huge leaps of logic and exaggerating the results of various studies. The Reddit source they linked to is from a telehealth medical provider who has invented a new condition and named it after himself. Skimming his writings gives strong pseudoscience / alternative medicine vibes. For example, Cushing's syndrome is a disorder of extreme excess cortisol. The incidence is est…

Cushing syndrome is and overarching term that encompases Cushing disease, subclinical Cushing syndrome, paraneoplastic Cushing's disease, and other tumors. subclinical Cushing's was more what I was referring to when I wrote 'congenital form of Cushing's syndrome'. You don't honestly think I was talking about something that is a 1-in-100,000 condition when talking about Alzheimer's do you?

As you want to be pedantic 'Subclinical Hypercortisolism' would be the much more accurate terminology.

Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#154
post #60

Microbiome 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 taking the effort to write that up. Comments like yours are what makes reading the HN forum worthwhile for me.

Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#155

If 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…

Not really weighing in one way or another, but I do not see scatter plots in the paper other than one PCA plot (which was not LDA... not sure why they chose PCA, so no strong reason to expect point separation there, though I do not know the diversity metric they are using so feel free to ignore my commentary). Violin plots always look like they overlap. I think seaborn's split=True should be pushed a bit harder.

Figure 3 is the one showing the cognitive results.

Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically don't eat food that comes in a box. Eat fresh or frozen meats, vegetables, fruits, some whole grains. In most supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid everything in the center aisles.

Another way I've heard it stated: "single ingredient foods." And as you prepare them, try to keep them that way. For example, adding a ton of butter to potatoes makes them 10x less healthy. More or less, calorically they become fries. Fries taste great but they should be an occasional treat, not a staple.

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Re: Scientists discover links between Alzheimer's disease and gut microbiota

#157
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrial processing. As a simple rule, the longer the list of ingredients on the food label, the more processed. The ingredients aren't something you'd normally think of as food? More processed.

Keep in mind that if you buy a bunch of "let's pretend it's not processed" "healthy" foods and use them to cook a meal, you're a) creating an ultra-processed meal, and b) it now has a long list of ingredients, you're just not writing it down.

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