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This is getting flagged down as a dumb joke, but for those in the cheap seats, it's not entirely clear exactly how this differs. Presumably adding "adding albu
by downerending 6y ago
This is getting flagged down as a dumb joke, but for those in the cheap seats, it's not entirely clear exactly how this differs. Presumably adding "adding albumin and water" is different than just "adding water". But why, exactly? And so on.
- abakker 6y agoIf you’ve never encountered someone with low blood albumin, it is a very serious problem. You get terrible edema all over. Albumin helps you not retain the water in your cells, and instead to get the fluid back into your bloodstream for excretion.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y agois there a way to supplement it, such as milk or egg whites?
- James_Henry 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoalbuminemia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoalbuminemia If your albumin levels are low, then you probably have more serious problems than your albumin levels being low, so you'd want to treat the underlying condition.
- abakker 6y agoYeah - the person I knew who had it had cancer, and was dying of it. It is not common, and speaks of major organ failure.
- downerending 6y agoI haven't. But the idiot in me wants to ask whether I could just drink loads of albumin in water and "dilute" myself that way, without all of this weird dialysis, etc. Presumably not, but why not, exactly?
- naasking 6y agoIt differs because everything except saline and albumin is filtered out. The point is to show that some markers of aging are harmful byproducts in your blood, and filtering them out can have positive effects.
- perl4ever 6y agoIt seems kind of unsurprising to me, given dialysis is a thing. Actually, now I'm wondering, could this be a simpler substitute for dialysis in some cases?
- naasking 6y agoIt's surprising in the sense that even people with fully functioning kidneys could benefit from it.
- derefr 6y agoI would say that it's unsurprising that our organs are less than perfect at doing their jobs, given that they operate under various constraints (e.g. running under an ATP power budget, one tuned for an ancestral environment where dying of hunger was a real concern; being only able to eliminate metabolic waste at the rate blood flow can take it away; having to avoid strategies that lead to DNA damage, like running anaerobically for long periods; etc.) Therefore, it's also unsurprising that external devices can do some of an organ's jobs "better" than the organ itself can. They devices don't have the same constraints our organs do. This effect is already very clear for pacemakers: hearts are very bad at keeping themselves going in oxygen-poor conditions (as they effectively have a circular dependency—a heart can't beat without flowing oxygenated blood); but electronic pacemakers don't need oxygen, and so keep the heart going under such conditions, until oxygen-rich blood can return. Once we perfect stem-cell organ synthesis, it'd be intriguing to know whether "untethered" human longevity could be increased just by sticking "moar kidney" and "moar liver" into the body, than the human body-plan calls for by default.
- James_Henry 6y agoTherapeutic plasma exchange is use in cases of renal disorder: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6521768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6521768/