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Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

ucsf.edu

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Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#71

Post by arghwhat »

peteretep wrote: post #52
8note wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it

> that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. No. An appeal to authority would be "this must be true because someone authoritative said it". Saying "I am willing to treat this claim more credibly than other claims because the source is credible" is not a logical fallacy.

Assigning any credibility to a statement based on the identity of its source is indeed the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority".

Whether you say "it must be true", or "it is likely to be true" does not matter. Credibility must only come from the statement itself and the evidence to support it.

However, while it is a logical fallacy, it is reasonable to temporarily hold beliefs for or against the truthfulness of a statement while no or insufficient evidence is present. As long as belief is not mistaken for proof, nothing is wrong about having such gut-feeling.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#72

Post by brownbat »

8note wrote: post #48
autokad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the authors discovered prions, so I am not so quick to discount their work.

that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it

This fallacy is usually taught as appeal to irrelevant authority. It concerns relying on those who purport to be experts but lack any actual expertise.

"The ad verecundiam fallacy concerns appeals to authority or expertise. Fundamentally, the fallacy involves accepting as evidence for a proposition the pronouncement of someone who is taken to be an authority but is not really an authority."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (9): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/

Here we have a researcher who is an expert in the thing he's talking about. There are still absolutely reasons to be guarded-- the matter is not fully decided, it's just one study. Maybe this is an example of an ongoing controversy, and we're selectively ignoring other experts?

But it is different to extend a cautious benefit of the doubt here than it would be to take, say, Paul Rudd's word on the topic as final.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#73

Post by bboygravity »

Cosi1125 wrote: post #69
bboygravity wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or do we? People taking acyclovir regularly (to suppress HSV1 and 2 symptoms) have been found to have a 10 fold decrease in risk of getting Alzheimer's (Taiwanese study). https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322463.php Additional studies are currently ongoing to confirm this in the US. The scientific "journalists" seem to jump to the conclusion that therefor HSV1,2 must be cuasal for Alzheimer's. But it could be…

Or, you know, it might be that Alzheimer's has an autoimmune factor contributing to it... :-)

Can you elaborate? As far as I know the immunesystem "has no access" to the brain?

Also by "factor" do you mean protein?

I'm just an electronics guy, would love to know more.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#74

Post by rossenberg79 »

cjbprime wrote: post #14

Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…

The worst part is that while articles about a disease like this are a mere annoyance to us, for people with loved ones with the disease or suffering from the disease itself it becomes a cruel joke.

These are people who scour the internet looking for any information they can find and carefully read articles like this looking for a bit of hope that there may be a solution. But it’s bullshit. Don’t share these articles, for their sake.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#75

Post by arkades »

outlace wrote: post #28

Taken out of context, the press release makes this finding look a lot more ground-breaking than it is after I quickly read through the actual study. Still a good piece of work though. It was already known, as pointed out in the actual paper, that Amyloid-beta (AB) and Tau, the proteins that have long been implicated in Alzheimer's disease (AD), have prion-like properties which means they exist in an abnormal 3D confi…

The big issue that AB/hyperTau studies seem to studiously ignore: studies in human brains have found an inverse correlation between the sites of the brain with excess plaque formation and the sites of the brain with the most significant atrophy and functional decline.

This is unsurprising, given the last two decades of drug trials targeting these molecules have all uniformly failed.

The alternative hypothesis is that these plaques are protective against neuronal infections that provoke alzheimers. That hypothesis has not garnered wide support yet, though it is growing, and is at least consistent with the inverse relationship observed.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#76

Post by fjfaase »

netwanderer3 wrote: post #65
stareatgoats wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting topic. Here is an anecdote that I found through a simple web search that somewhat addresses your question: "Few studies have looked carefully at the risk of dementia in vegetarians versus other people, and the data is contradictory. One small study of California residents found that meat eaters were more likely to become demented than their vegetarian counterparts. Another study in Alzheimer’s patients, h…

You're right, I used to know a few vegetarians who often supplement their diets with Vitamin B-12 which theoretically could help boosting and balance their cognitive ability vs. meat eaters. I personally did not notice any cognitive problems in those people at least. Our DNA contains the sequence of folding steps instruction for each protein to fold. So for a protein to misfold itself, could this mean it must have re…

As I understand it, the DNA only contains the sequence of amino-acids from which the protein is built, not their folding instructions. Some proteins are also modified and/or cut in pieces by other proteins before reaching a functional state. Discovering how a protein folds, is a very complex problem, that would have been much easier if it were indeed encoded by the DNA. the website https://fold.it/portal/ gives a good introduction to the problem of protein folding.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#77

Post by mikeash »

arghwhat wrote: post #71
peteretep wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. No. An appeal to authority would be "this must be true because someone authoritative said it". Saying "I am willing to treat this claim more credibly than other claims because the source is credible" is not a logical fallacy.

Assigning any credibility to a statement based on the identity of its source is indeed the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority". Whether you say "it must be true", or "it is likely to be true" does not matter. Credibility must only come from the statement itself and the evidence to support it. However, while it is a logical fallacy, it is reasonable to temporarily hold beliefs for or against the truthfulnes…

There’s nothing fallacious about assigning greater probability to a claim made by a relevant authority. Such claims are actually more likely to be true.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#78

Post by mikeash »

arcticbull wrote: post #50
8note wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. we believe things only once we've exhausted our attempts to disprove it

Parent is right this is an appeal to authority. It doesn’t make it more or less right whether a Nobel prize winner comes up with the idea or my mom does, we need to evaluate it on its merits alone. The corollary as I mentioned in a sibling post is that when you have a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

We rely on a million appeals to authority every day of our lives. Try some new food, trusting that it won’t kill you because somebody says it won’t, and nobody bats an eye. Say you give more weight to a study performed by an expert, when that has no immediate bearing on your life, and everybody loses their mind.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#79

Post by JoeSamoa »

labster wrote: post #33
thanatropism wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when you’re an authority on prions everything looks like a prion disease.

As a web developer, I'm curious if Alzheimer's is really a cross-site scripting attack. If so, we could prevent it by encoding the amino entities, and that would be a game changer.

The encoding would have to be part of our DNA though right? Do you think this method would work as a treatment or just as a method of prevention?

I like your mindset and I think your metaphor may be correct.

Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study

#80

Post by resiros »

echelon wrote: post #43
telchar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before th…

Just to provide background, what you describe is nowhere close to feasible. Designing novel proteins is computationally intractable. It took evolution billions of years and parallel optimization to figure out how to problem solve with polypeptides. We're not even at the punch card phase.

That is simply not true, we have been making great progress in protein design in the last years. I recommend you take a look at this Nature review by Baker one of the biggest names in the field:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19946.pdf?origin=ppub

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