6 ms·
Dying Organs Restored to Life in Novel Experiments
- jhou2 8y agoA brief search shows that mitochondrial transplantation for myocardial infarction was described in 2008. Astonishing work. This is starting to become more mainstream in the last couple of years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18978192
- empath75 8y agoIt would be hard to convince me to sign up for such a study, if there’s a 50% chance they give me a placebo and I die.
- T-A 8y agoYou would rather not sign up and go for the 100% percent chance they give you nothing and you die?
- Engineering-MD 8y agoIn clinical trials, pure placebos are very rarely used (only in mild conditions or where no treatment exists). Commonly novel therapies are compared against the current treatment of choice.
- michaelscott 8y agoI was about to ask how ethical it could be to give a pure placebo in cases as serious as heart failure, when simply telling the patient (or the patient's family) that they received some other more conventional procedure should produce similar results.
- nine_k 8y agoI think this is never done. I suppose both groups receive two therapies, one of them being the best available therapy for the condition, and the other either the new therapy, or a placebo. This requires new and old therapies to be compatible, though.
- ceejayoz 8y agoStudies will also be suspended if it becomes clear that one treatment is so obviously better as to be unethical to continue with the other.
- raverbashing 8y agoMaybe in those cases, if the treatment, if it shows promise, should be given also to the people that were given placebo (after the study)
- contravariant 8y agoAt that point it's far from certain that the medicine will give you higher chances of survival though.
- CodeCube 8y agoI'm very excited about this stuff ... but as a relatively healthy person, I'm gonna wait for v1.1 :)
- JacobDotVI 8y agoFrom Edward Tufte’s book “Data Analysis for Politics and Policy”: “One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.” It was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”” https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/dapp/DAPP1.pdf https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/dapp/DAPP1.pdf (further attributed to Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr, as quoted in Medical World News, September 1, 1972, p. 45)
- T-A 8y agoIt occurs to me that mitochondrial decline also seems to be an important aspect of aging. If you can just infuse mitochondria through the blood and "the organelles will gravitate almost magically to the injured cells that need them and take up residence", that suggests a rather obvious rejuvenation approach.
- raverbashing 8y agoAnd do different cross have different mitochondria? I would be tempted to say no but I'm not sure
- seandougall 8y agoAll the cells in the body have the same mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the maternal side (egg cells have them, sperm cells don’t). (Edit: except for cells that have no mitochondria, of course)
- raverbashing 8y agoYes but do they differentiate across different cell types?
- seandougall 8y agoIANABiologist, but my understanding is that they don’t differentiate; they have too simplistic a structure for that, and rely on the host cells for many of their functions. The main differences seen across cell types is whether they are present or not.
- TomMarius 8y agoMy girlfriend is a biologist. She is saying that all cells that have mitochondrias in a human body have the same mitochondrial DNA.
- gaius 8y ago
- dhimes 8y agoIt!!! Could!!! Work!!!!!! (Apologies to Mel Brooks/Young Frankenstein)
- cromwellian 8y agoWait, how do the mitochondria get back into the cells? Presumably the cell membrane somehow permits them to pass but how are they recognized? If a mechanism exists to recognize and permit them to move into a cell, doesn’t that either suggest they can move out of cells as well and/or confirm the theory that mitochondria were symbiotes? That is, there’s something in cell DNA that encodes a mechanism for foreign symbiotes to cross the cell membrane?
- 88e282102ae2e5b 8y agoI was also surprised by this. In the papers where they did this work, they discuss many previously-known mechanisms for intercellular mitochondrial transfer - apparently cells can form nanotubes and exchange organelles, and that's relatively well-studied. That's not what's happening here, though, and they state that the mechanism at play is unknown.
- picsao 8y agoCan mitochondria be stunned?