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My father is a neurologist and he always tells me that until the 90s or so, Alzheimer was mush rarer than other diseases (although the life expectancy was not t
by thomasrossi 11y ago
My father is a neurologist and he always tells me that until the 90s or so, Alzheimer was mush rarer than other diseases (although the life expectancy was not that much shorter than today). There must be some environmental cause to it and it should be pretty simple to get. We only need some control population with similar life-span, one has no exposition to tv, one hasn't something else.. etc
- Madmallard 11y agoLet's see: Psychotropics and bacteriocidal antibiotics are both linked with diseases like alzheimers because they are cytotoxic and can lead to oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage. They are also being more and more commonly prescribed. Air's less and less clean. God knows how many chemicals are being added to foods, water, construction, and the environment that are unregulated or poorly studied. I remember seeing something recently like thousands of chemicals are being used without FDA approval. There's also the grandfather theory or whatever. The few generations before us are some of the first in the industrial revolution, and all of the new exposures in that are causing DNA changes that are propagating to offspring, and newer generations are feeling the negative after effects of it. Yup, we're fucked.
- Brakenshire 11y agoIf there's an environmental chemical cause, the 2006 REACH legislation in the EU should provide an interesting comparative study with the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Authorisation_and_Restriction_of_Chemicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Auth... I don't think I'd agree that air is less and less clean, incidentally. There have been big improvements in clean technology for cars and other vehicles, big reductions in the use of coal in developed countries, and so on. And I doubt other environmental pollutants are significantly higher than they were in the age before serious environmental legislation (for instance, before the EPA was created)
- Madmallard 11y agoI think you put too much trust in the government's ability to regulate pollutants and chemical exposures. Governments are like using using an imperative programming paradigm to address a massively parallel system with innumerable amounts of state. Googling "unregulated contaminants" brings up quite a lot of articles. You might be right about the air cleanliness thing. I recall my father saying how the air was disgusting where I live now, 40 years ago.
- dagw 11y agoThere could also be a diagnostic factor. It's only since the 90's or so, when effective treatments for Alzheimer's started to show up, that doctors started to really differentiate between Alzheimer's and 'normal' senility and age-related dementia.
- lazyjones 11y agoIt could be something trivial like Aluminum in bread and pastries because bakeries switched to faster (compared to iron) aluminum baking trays.
- reasonattlm 11y agoAlzheimer's disease risk is correlated with the amount of visceral fat tissue you carry and how long you carry it for. Like type 2 diabetes the prevalence is very much a result of the increasing degree to which people are overweight.