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

Peptides: where to begin?

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 431 posts

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#321

Post by cjbgkagh »

bertylicious wrote: post #131
cjbgkagh wrote: post #65

Peptides are a revolution and you don't need to know how they work to know that they work (for various people for various conditions). There is a tension between empiricism and fundamentalism with much of medical science focusing on fundamentalism. Now with the ability to collect and search large amounts of empirical data and communicate it peer-to-peer people are picking up on a lot of things that work without knowi…

I'm pretty sure there is no diagnostic test for ME/CFS. What are you referring to? Also I don't understand how semaglutide did help you while you're at the same time part of a minority risk group with a hypersensitivity to it. Isn't that a contradiction?

There are now a number of very definitive tests, most related to immune system profiling. Prof. Ron Davis has some good research and has shown that plasma from someone with ME/CFS when combined with normal red blood cells will greatly diminish the ability for red blood cells to handle stress (pumping out salt).

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#322

Post by deng »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #317
deng wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a tension between empiricism and fundamentalism with much of medical science focusing on fundamentalism. This is a deeply unfair statement, and also a false dichotomy. Medical science is of course empiric. What you call "fundamentalism" is that compounds need to undergo a rigorous regiment of empiric testing before they are given to potentially millions of people. And no, it's not just because of Thalidomi…

Doctors have been maligning ME/CFS as psychosamatic for decades and generally still do despite a large amount of modern evidence to the contrary. If you have it it’s clearly not, you can get good and bad days that are clearly not dependent on psychological state. In addition I have it due to hEDS which is a condition that is almost never diagnosed due to aforementioned blind spots. Most doctors still think the preval…

I completely understand your frustration with the lack of knowledge and research in ME/CFS. It's a scandal, given the prevalence and seriousness of the condition. Unfortunately, after Covid, ME/CFS was even more politicized as part of the long-Covid discussions and got caught up in the culture wars. I have several friends with ME/CFS and they basically say the same things you do - ignorant doctors, high cost due to medication usually being off-label and not covered by insurance, and even friends don't take the condition seriously.

ME/CFS research is severely underfunded. The reasons for this are not simple, it's partly due to the complexity of the disease which, as cynical as it is, does not make it an attractive research topic for ambitious scientists. Same goes for "Big Pharma". Clinical trials for ME/CFS are extremely complicated, and hence expensive, due to the myriad of symptoms in how the condition can appear. It makes research in this area very difficult and expensive. There's very little funding for ME/CFS research, and that needs to change. Unfortunately, especially in the US, this is not going to happen for Kennedy reasons.

The Bayesian statistics thing is a bit of red herring, though. While your are correct that the math is old, the needed compute resources for doing Bayesian modeling on large trials was simply not there until recently. But it is also correct that it also took a long time until there were official rules regarding this from FDA and EMA. These regulatory things move very, very slowly.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#323

Post by tekla »

steveBK123 wrote: post #312
throwaway2037 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some without a ton of continuing education. Where did you get this idea? I did a simple, five second Google search and learned that on average, US doctors are required to complete about 50 hours of continuing education for each one- to two-year recert cycle. (On HN, I also hear similar complaints about public school teachers. It isn't true. Public school teachers are required to do similar continuing education.)

Mandate vs interest. Compare how seriously many SWEs take mandatory HR/compliance trainings vs hanging out on HN, taking online courses, arguing about code, trying new frameworks, coding in spare time, etc.

HN SWE's rarely do anything important. Doctors generally do.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#324

Post by malfist »

staticassertion wrote: post #274
throwaway2037 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the exact quote: > You’re not going to be taking these things orally... These mail-order peptides are injectable items. Every single YouTube video and blog post I have read about peptites is exclusively about injectable supplements.

That's not the exact quote lol you cut out the exact part I was referring to. > because unless a really substantial amount of engineering has gone into it, any given peptide is going get the same treatment from your digestive system as a chicken breast does, i.e. a complete teardown > Every single YouTube video and blog post I have read about peptites is exclusively about injectable supplements. Collagen peptides, gh…

> Collagen peptides, ghk-cu, and many other peptide supplements are often taken orally.

And with very rare exceptions, it's as useful as watching someone workout when you want to gain muscle. Every meat we eat is awash in peptides, and to keep our body from getting hijacked by the signaling for, say a chicken, our body has to break down almost all peptides ingested orally.

There are a few exceptions, notably there's one that is produced by our own bile acid, that can be taken orally, and then SNAC, which was developed by Novo Nordisk over thirty years and has extremely limited capabilities and is fully patented and cannot be made by your fly by night distributers. SNAC achieves a whopping 1% bioavailability of the peptide, and it's ability to work depends on the size of the peptide, specifically the only commercially available use for this is Rybelsus.

Oral peptides are snake oil for the most part.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#325

Post by allador »

ggm wrote: post #182

I'm here for two probably contradictory comments. The first is collagen: I'd love to see Lowe's take on recent peer review which says boosting oral collagen does appear to show signs of improved joint pain and skin resilience. Obviously modulated through how protein deprived you are, but for older people, eating enough protein can be an issue: it's not rapidly absorbed so you need 3 squares a day to get to the higher…

Note that there is research showing that whey protein powder has exactly the same effects as collagen, for much lower price.

Mechanistically it makes sense, as I understand the ingredients in Collagen are largely a subset of the ingredients in whey powder, albeit at different ratios.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#326

Post by array_key_first »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #174
jmye wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, hamburgers and milkshakes don’t give you heart disease and cancer. Overeating, oxidative stress from low-quality ingredients, etc might. What? “Oxidative stress”? Oh come on, at least go full “seed oil” if we’re going to talk nonsense.

We already left the land of reason far behind by the time OP implied hamburgers and milkshakes give people cancer.

Red meat is a carcinogen, I don't know what to tell you.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#327

Post by malfist »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #275
oa335 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is well known that there are some small peptides that are absorbed following oral administration. ...BPC-157 itself is said to be among this class Do you know of any studies that suggest BPC-157 absorption from gut?

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jor.21107 Among others. If you read the paper, it's actually apparent that there's little difference between i.p. and oral administration in terms of efficacy -- both were roughly equally effective in improving MCL ligament healing. Admittedly the paper's in rats -- as are 99% of the others -- as there's no incentive for anybody to run human trials.

You should note that your study is not controlled.

There are two groups, those with oral administration those with sub-q administration. There is not group without administration.

This means you can't say that oral vs injected is "equally effective" because you can't assert that BPC 157 is effective at all. You can't tease out the effect size because you don't know if any or all of the MCL ligament healing was done via normal pathways

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#328

Post by allador »

arjie wrote: post #213

I used retatrutide for weight loss and went from 199.3 lbs to just under 175 lbs. I kept daily notes through the process. Here's a quick AI one-paragraph summary if you're curious: https://pastebin.com/XACNYKvs Overall I'm quite pleased with the effects and many of the properties of this treatment that people dislike are actually properties I was looking for. Essentially, for pharmacological interventions I want impe…

Please be careful here, as Retatritude is not actually commercially available in most of the world, outside of research labs. And is not FDA approved to buy or use in the US (where most of HN readers are).

I fear this kind of post will encourage gullible people to go chasing reta on the grey market, where they might as well be getting a placebo, as there's no mechanism for your typical person to verify that they're getting what they think they're getting.

And given it's an injectable, and bacterial growth, or a variety of other toxins that can remain in poorly manufactured pharmaceuticals, can do a great deal of harm.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#329

Post by cjbgkagh »

deng wrote: post #235
ndr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the grandparent meant "fundamentalism" as "mechanistic", and lots of things we can know (as you say using the scientific method) to be useful long before we have a good mechanistic explanation of how they work. Some examples: aspirin (willow bark used for thousands of years, drug synthesized in 1897 and mechanism explained almost 100y later), or general anesthesia used again since mid 1800s and the mechanism…

But it is usually not necessary for approval of a compound to be able to describe how it works on a molecular or cellular level. What you need to show are three things: efficacy, safety and quality, so basically: the compound has the intended clinical benefit, has an acceptable safety profile and can be produced with a consistent manufacturing quality. Most compounds fail because of lack of efficacy (roughly half), a…

The vast majority of drug candidates don’t make it to the trial stage. Much of the research has to be defensible prior to the trial and what makes them defensible is having a mechanism for action. Of course once a drug is being used off label there starts to be some empirical data which can be used for trials, and it seems that we’ll get lucky with GLP1-As.

Re: Peptides: where to begin?

#330

Post by allador »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #65

Peptides are a revolution and you don't need to know how they work to know that they work (for various people for various conditions). There is a tension between empiricism and fundamentalism with much of medical science focusing on fundamentalism. Now with the ability to collect and search large amounts of empirical data and communicate it peer-to-peer people are picking up on a lot of things that work without knowi…

That is so dangerous, buying grey market replicas of pharmaceuticals.

Unless you have a research lab built out in your house, you have zero way of knowing what it is that you're actually getting. Whether the dosing matches the claimed dose. Whether there are bacterial growth, or other manufacturing chemical left in by bottom-of-the-barrel chinese manufacturer.

I understand your risk profile may be different than others, but when you can get the real thing officially, I'm not sure why anyone would risk this.

Post reply on HN