7 ms·
Pretty sure Alzheimer's isn't good for you, either. I'd take any health risks over dementia, personally, and I'm sure most would, too. Looking forward to the F
by wrong_internet 11y ago
Pretty sure Alzheimer's isn't good for you, either.
I'd take any health risks over dementia, personally, and I'm sure most would, too. Looking forward to the FDA blocking this on "safety" grounds.
- carbocation 11y agoIt's amazing to me that people are willing to experiment with an unapproved chemical that provides no proven benefit in humans, yet aren't willing to use human-proven therapies with known benefits such as statins.
- leoedin 11y agoPresumably these "people" you speak of are actually different people (unless you have evidence of the parent choosing not to use statins?) People tend to vary wildly in choices and opinions. Who knew!?
- phkahler 11y ago>> People tend to vary wildly in choices and opinions. Who knew!? But some people think their choice or opinion is somehow the "correct" one and should be imposed on everyone ;-)
- RobertoG 11y agoMaybe they are not the same people?
- Udik 11y agoWell, it's not for a sore knee. Is there anything more unapproved than an irreversible disease that destroys your mind in the space of a few years? It's not like cancer, from which you might be cured, or at least with which you can have a meaningful life until your eventual death. It is a slow motion process of erasure that is well on its way at the moment of the first diagnosis. Taking the wrong medicine could shorten your brain's life of how much, a year perhaps? Still worth trying.
- FreeFull 11y agoTaking chemicals which haven't been made for human consumption and haven't been tested thoroughly could render you dead much faster than that.
- pizza 11y agoYes, obviously. But what about new chemicals where testing has been done, without significant observed damage? Is that considered safe after enough observations, or would a single fatality skew your risk-minimizing behavior?
- callesgg 11y agoDead can to be honest be better than full blown Alzheimer's.
- tormeh 11y agoThis. If there's a 10% chance it works and you don't die, I bet a lot of Alzheimer's patients would jump on it.
- TrevorJ 11y agoAlzheimer's is such an awful way to go, I can see how people would chance it.
- sliverstorm 11y agoWhen it comes to rapid onset dementia, that's a risk many people are willing to take.
- roywiggins 11y agoSome people go to Switzerland for specific chemicals to render them dead as fast as possible, since they see it as preferable to living with Alzheimer's. Admittedly it seems like a bit of a gamble to just start popping drugs whether they've been studied or not, but people spend lots of money on "natural" supplements which are at least usually reasonably safe but are even less likely to work.
- Zigurd 11y agoMany people are quite cynical about Big Pharma
- tptacek 11y agoHow many of those people would trade the portfolio of medications available today for those available in 1955?
- Zigurd 11y agoNobody, of course. But would you prefer not to have drugs of dubious effectiveness marketed like consumer products? It's not an either or choice.
- tptacek 11y agoI would definitely prefer not to have chemical compounds that haven't been demonstrated effective marketed as consumer medical products. I'm not sure how that connects to the thread, though.
- Zigurd 11y ago> demonstrated effective While there are some drugs that are clearly effective, there are big problems in Big Pharma's approach to clinical trials, including burying half the trials' results and poor experiment design. And once a drug makes it to market, expanding that market without testing becomes a priority. Do you think Risperdal was a one-off, or is it a representative case study of how drugs are marketed by at least a major part of Big Pharma?
- bitJericho 11y agoYes, those people don't experiment with dangerous chemicals, instead they happily give their dollars to big placebo!
- fao_ 11y ago
- LordKano 11y agoIf I was slowly losing my mind, I'd even try experimental drugs that came with a 20% chance of sudden death. There's not much worse than having your mind die while your body is still alive.
- gus_massa 11y agoBut perhaps it has other nasty side effects, maybe another 20% to get instant dementia. Just to pick another unrelated chemical example that is well known, 30ml of methanol will kill you but 10ml will make you permanently blind.
- 4ad 11y ago> 30ml of methanol will kill you but 10ml will make you permanently blind. How is this relevant?
- SuperComputing 11y agoThere is one _very safe_ and _very easy_ thing to do that has been shown to be correlated with a reduced risk for Alzheimers, as well as a host of other diseases: Maintain a BMI of 24.9 or below: http://www.voanews.com/content/obesity-associated-with-earlier-alzheimer-disease-onset/2943249.html http://www.voanews.com/content/obesity-associated-with-earli... 2/3rds of Americans don't do this! It's mind-boggling.
- vox_mollis 11y agoprovides no proven benefit in humans I know there's very good reason to be wary of mouse models, but in cases (as this appears to be) where the physiological mechanism of disease is both (a) understood and (b) the same from mouse to human, a little less skepticism may be warranted.
- bro-stick 11y agoMouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells. It's also now possible to do clinically-useful testing of targeted treatments using genetically-edited control tissue cultures against unedited tissue cultures. The point is that it's better to test something that is as close to the patient as possible, not guess with other species or even other people whom express genes differently. FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane/simpler/reproducible way to do the exact same thing.
- PixelB 11y ago>>Mouse models are rapidly becoming obsolete as it's becoming easier than ever to model entire, differentiated tissues grown from red blood cell-derived adult stem cells. No they aren't. Transgenic mouse models are a $billion industry. We do not understand biological mechanisms nearly enough to not use live animal models. We are not even able to recreate single cell organisms with our level of knowledge and engineering. >>FYI: making a new mouse models requires lots of chopping off heads of mice whom don't possess the desired gene. While transgenic, highly-edited living models might be nice, there's probably a more humane and simpler way to do the exact same thing. Ah, the real root of your argument. Do you even know what the word humane means? I work in a labroatory and the animals are treated better than the people. Yes, a lot of mice are killed.. but for a reason. You say there's probably a simpler way to do the exact same thing, but there simply isn't. I wish more people were actually educated in this matter, but emotional responses tend to get more results.
- bro-stick 11y agoHippies often did the same thing. It's pretty dumb to just throw compounds in your body without having a guestimate about their effects. In the future, medical clinicians won't have to guess as much because adult stem cells can now be created from red blood cells, allowing personalized medication with a petri model of actual patient tissue, to screen problems like interactions and allergies before administration.
- efm 11y agoThe Cochrane report on statins confirms your claim: http://www.cochrane.org/CD004816/VASC_statins-for-the-primary-prevention-of-cardiovascular-disease http://www.cochrane.org/CD004816/VASC_statins-for-the-primar...
- ank_the_elder 11y agoThere's a lot of subtlety when it comes to statins: "Statins are beneficial, but some have questioned whether their benefits are due to their ability to lower cholesterol or to their anti-inflammatory effects, or both. There are two competing hypotheses, the LDL hypothesis and the statin hypothesis. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine sheds some light on that controversy and tips the balance in favor of the LDL hypothesis." https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-cholesterol-and-statins/ https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/update-on-cholesterol-a...
- angdis 11y agoI think what you're responding to is NOT about willingness to experiment with unproven drugs, but rather a feeling of horror about dementia and Alzheimer's disease. These are awful afflictions that impact not just the victims but also their families. That said, regardless of whether or not they're proven/approved/tested, drugs are never magic bullets. The ones used to treat the most serious chronic diseases always come with serious risks and profound side-effects. I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
- celticninja 11y agoI expect there is a Venn diagram that would cover this small subset of people that fulfill your 2 requirements but most people probably fall into one or the other.
- gozur88 11y agoDementia is death a little bit at a time. At that point you really don't have much to lose by trying an experimental drug.
- nolok 11y agoMost people would take "be at risk of health problem" against "not lose your mind". The question (and the effect in both sides) are still worth asking