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[deleted]

Gatsky 5y ago
There are some attempts to correlate with human pathology at least, they examine brains from patients with schizophrenia.
omginternets 5y ago
This kind of comment has no substance and just betrays a lack of understanding about the role of animal models. Mouse models are imperfect, but they tell us quite a lot about humans. That's why we use them. Where they are weak, we adjust the experiment and the conclusions accordingly. I apologize if I seem frustrated. In truth, I am. Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating.
- Sightline 5y ago
  >Comments like this lower the level of discourse His comment was crafted to do exactly that.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    I don't like to infer people's motives, but I suspect it is more exactly a self-aggrandizing "look at how smart I am because I am calling bullshit" reflex. I have been guilty of this in the past, and try very hard not to do it now.
    - hairofadog 5y ago
      It was meant to be a friendly joke. Apologies; It wasn't my intent to bring down the discourse.
      - coolso 5y ago
        Your joke was a good one and I think more people appreciated it than you’d think. I considered it to bring up the discourse. I don’t think it’s right for others to attempt to guilt trip and bully you into removing it.
      - omginternets 5y ago
        I didn't realize it was a joke. Sorry! :)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- smt88 5y ago
  This headline absolutely needs an "in mice" added to it to be accurate. Also, we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. They seem to be poor models more often than they're not. I agree that they're valuable, but there is also extreme over-reporting of results in mice, leading laypeople to make decisions in their lives based on those very early and/or extreme studies.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    >This headline absolutely needs an "in mice" added to it to be accurate. Yes, that is fair. But we both know the comment went further than that.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. Mice models don't attract many rights protesters, the way other animals would, even though they are just as sentient and intelligent as humans, dogs, cats, horses, and whales. Why don't animal rights protesters stick up for mice more? This experiment sounded like a horrific experience for the participants.
    - smt88 5y ago
      Animal rights absolutists are certainly against animal studies and protest them. There just aren't that many of those people. For the rest of us, the horrific experiments are theoretically in the service of reducing human suffering. A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade (although the real ratio is unknowable).
      - wombatmobile 5y ago
        > A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade What are you measuring or estimating in that calculus?
        5y ago
- somesortofthing 5y ago
  I feel like you're giving the people aggressively generalizing results from studies like these too much of the benefit of the doubt. The mice in this study were fed a diet that was more than 2/3 sucrose, compared to an average of ~20% in human diets. The level of attention given to these studies does far more to lower the level of discourse than the people who point out how exaggerated the model used to reach the study's conclusion is.
  - cik2e 5y ago
    This study, and others like it that use mice, would be a lot more interesting if they bucketed out some ranges for the test variable. For this one, I would have liked to see groups with 20, 40, 60, and 80% sugar diets.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    >The mice in this study were fed a diet that was more than 2/3 sucrose, compared to an average of ~20% in human diets. Honest question: do you know the reason why they do this? It is not done by accident.
    - somesortofthing 5y ago
      To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis. And it's understandable that this is done given academia's incentive structure, and you could justify this study's existence as a foundation for further studies, but real damage is done to the discourse around these topics when people pick up on these results and generalize them across both input size and species lines. This study alone tells us virtually nothing useful about whether or not "High-sucrose diets contribute to brain angiopathy and higher brain dysfunctions" in humans, as the post's title implies.
      - omginternets 5y ago
        >To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis. No. The reason is to approximate long-term exposure. There are obviously (big!) problems with that, but we don't have a better way of "speeding up time". You really should try to understand things before you attack them with tired caricatures of legitimate arguments.
- coolso 5y ago
  > Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating. When certain groups of people have a monopoly on the spread of information as well as the narrative accompanying it, then these “lower levels of discourse” are perfectly acceptable as a grassroots counter. You may be frustrated because it is a very effective counter. Mockery/jokes, even very innocent mockery (which rings very true, by the way) like the one in the comment you quoted, is one of the most effective means to fight back against authoritarianism et al. Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” or go against establishment opinion. Sorry but we don’t haven’t take what they give without pushing back a bit. We’re not going to just roll over and take it.
  - funkHouse 5y ago
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” Sites have always had terms of service. If you're seeing them enforced more often, it's because we've reached the end of the laissez-faire enforcement experiment for several key large sites; they attempted to maximize what was allowed, and found they had facilitated an attempted coup in their headquarters country, which would not be in their best interests.
    - coolso 5y ago
      Yet apparently, facilitating the burning down, rioting, and violence in cities across the country in the name of (allegedly) a convicted felon who died of a heart attack while restrained by police after attempting to drive on public streets high on fenty and meth, is in their best interests. Also, you... think this just started after January of last year? And that everyone who thinks differently than the establishment idea of what is "right" is part of that group? Interesting. You only further my point. The truth is, it has been happening for a while, but certainly sped itself up when the establishment realized that allowing people to freely spread ideas and opinions very likely resulted in that really mean tweeter winning, rather than the person they wanted to win, and that to ensure that the only ideas considered "correct" moving forward are allowed to propogate, that comments either needed to be disabled, or heavily regulated, by the very smart, very good people in Big Tech, who cried tears of frustration and anger after the Cheeto won. [0] [0]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-reveals-negative-reactions-trumps-election-1119490 https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-reveal...
- evandwight 5y ago
  How good are mice models? My uneducated thoughts are they are unlikely to generalize to humans - like testing carcinogens in petri dishes
  - omginternets 5y ago
    "It depends." I really can't answer more precisely than that without knowing what you consider to be a "good" model, and what you are interested in modeling. Perhaps a marginally more useful answer is that they can be _excellent_ metabolic and cellular models. It's a case of "if you know what your looking for, you can pick animal models that effectively have exactly what you're looking for". The "what", here, would be a metabolic pathway, for example.
    - evandwight 5y ago
      Ah. That makes sense. It's a tool that tests certain things. My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans? To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
      - omginternets 5y ago
        >My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans? Accuracy is very high when you are studying a metabolic pathway that is (near)identical in humans and in mice. >To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others. Yes. More precisely: animal models are accurate when the metabolic machinery in humans is also found in the animal model.
  - stevenwoo 5y ago
    I don't know if these issues have been fixed but here's a study that looked into all types of animal studies for cancer for an overview and suggested fixes and listed notable failures. There is one study here that showed a promising cancer treatment in mice used at 500x dilution in humans and it caused systemic organ failure in humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/
- foerbert 5y ago
  I disagree. It is relevant, and not lowering level of discourse. Animal models are both very useful and very limited. There is no way to 'adjust' them into such a perfect proxy that the model is irrelevant. You can do better, but at the end of the day the most important adjustment to make is to keep in mind that it is in fact... in mice. While "... in mice!" can get a little jokey at times, the alternative is often a discussion that more or less assumes that the smallest of effects in any model are directly actionable information for the readers. It's not. Even with human studies, a single study is rarely enough to come to strong conclusions. In an ideal world, sure, it's just a repetition of facts everybody knows because everybody read and understood the article before engaging in the discussion at all (even just reading). But that's unrealistic on multiple fronts. Until that's a reasonable assumption, I'm more than happy to see some reminders of important facts in the comments. Even if it spawns the occasional joke.
stevenwoo 5y ago
For sucrose, mice apparently have the opposite reaction that primates have in this study. Maybe the guys who did the linked study didn't read it. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)00376-4 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...
- imchillyb 5y ago
  > For sucrose, mice apparently have the opposite reaction that primates have in this study. Maybe the guys who did the linked study didn't read it. @stevenwoo Did YOU read the study, because it seems as if you may have skipped the very beginning reading... This is a direct quote. > The association of glucose with survival is inverse for mice versus monkeys/humans. That is -not at all- what the study in this post is reviewing, and is not the conclusion you're purporting. The study you linked looks at how glucose and aging work together. The study in this post is looking to how glucose affects the brain function itself, and what inhibitors are triggered by high-sucrose in a diet. > he high-sucrose diet induced microcapillary impairments and reduced brain glucose uptake in brains of Glo1-deficient mice. Aspirin protected against this angiopathy, enhancing brain glucose uptake and preventing abnormal behavioral phenotypes. Similar vascular damage to our model mice was found in the brains of randomly collected schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, suggesting that psychiatric disorders are associated with angiopathy in the brain caused by various environmental stresses, including metabolic stress. That's a direct quote from this post's linked study. These two studies are dissimilar enough to be completely different in comparison and their conclusions are not similar because the studies look at different effects of sucrose. This post's linked study looks at immediacy and how the sucrose interacts with the brain. Your post looks at the effects of aging and possible links to high-sucrose and fasting diets.
  - stevenwoo 5y ago
    You're right, I had multiple tabs open reading different studies and confounded a bit of them, but I'll leave my original comment as is.

[deleted]

There are some attempts to correlate with human pathology at least, they examine brains from patients with schizophrenia.

omginternets 5y ago

This kind of comment has no substance and just betrays a lack of understanding about the role of animal models. Mouse models are imperfect, but they tell us quite a lot about humans. That's why we use them. Where they are weak, we adjust the experiment and the conclusions accordingly. I apologize if I seem frustrated. In truth, I am. Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating.

Sightline 5y ago
>Comments like this lower the level of discourse His comment was crafted to do exactly that.
- omginternets 5y ago
  I don't like to infer people's motives, but I suspect it is more exactly a self-aggrandizing "look at how smart I am because I am calling bullshit" reflex. I have been guilty of this in the past, and try very hard not to do it now.
  - hairofadog 5y ago
    It was meant to be a friendly joke. Apologies; It wasn't my intent to bring down the discourse.
    - coolso 5y ago
      Your joke was a good one and I think more people appreciated it than you’d think. I considered it to bring up the discourse. I don’t think it’s right for others to attempt to guilt trip and bully you into removing it.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      I didn't realize it was a joke. Sorry! :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
smt88 5y ago
This headline absolutely needs an "in mice" added to it to be accurate. Also, we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. They seem to be poor models more often than they're not. I agree that they're valuable, but there is also extreme over-reporting of results in mice, leading laypeople to make decisions in their lives based on those very early and/or extreme studies.
- omginternets 5y ago
  >This headline absolutely needs an "in mice" added to it to be accurate. Yes, that is fair. But we both know the comment went further than that.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale. Mice models don't attract many rights protesters, the way other animals would, even though they are just as sentient and intelligent as humans, dogs, cats, horses, and whales. Why don't animal rights protesters stick up for mice more? This experiment sounded like a horrific experience for the participants.
  - smt88 5y ago
    Animal rights absolutists are certainly against animal studies and protest them. There just aren't that many of those people. For the rest of us, the horrific experiments are theoretically in the service of reducing human suffering. A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade (although the real ratio is unknowable).
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      > A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade What are you measuring or estimating in that calculus?
      - 5y ago
somesortofthing 5y ago
I feel like you're giving the people aggressively generalizing results from studies like these too much of the benefit of the doubt. The mice in this study were fed a diet that was more than 2/3 sucrose, compared to an average of ~20% in human diets. The level of attention given to these studies does far more to lower the level of discourse than the people who point out how exaggerated the model used to reach the study's conclusion is.
- cik2e 5y ago
  This study, and others like it that use mice, would be a lot more interesting if they bucketed out some ranges for the test variable. For this one, I would have liked to see groups with 20, 40, 60, and 80% sugar diets.
- omginternets 5y ago
  >The mice in this study were fed a diet that was more than 2/3 sucrose, compared to an average of ~20% in human diets. Honest question: do you know the reason why they do this? It is not done by accident.
  - somesortofthing 5y ago
    To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis. And it's understandable that this is done given academia's incentive structure, and you could justify this study's existence as a foundation for further studies, but real damage is done to the discourse around these topics when people pick up on these results and generalize them across both input size and species lines. This study alone tells us virtually nothing useful about whether or not "High-sucrose diets contribute to brain angiopathy and higher brain dysfunctions" in humans, as the post's title implies.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      >To maximize the possibility of producing a positive result for the hypothesis. No. The reason is to approximate long-term exposure. There are obviously (big!) problems with that, but we don't have a better way of "speeding up time". You really should try to understand things before you attack them with tired caricatures of legitimate arguments.
coolso 5y ago
> Comments like this lower the level of discourse, and it's frustrating. When certain groups of people have a monopoly on the spread of information as well as the narrative accompanying it, then these “lower levels of discourse” are perfectly acceptable as a grassroots counter. You may be frustrated because it is a very effective counter. Mockery/jokes, even very innocent mockery (which rings very true, by the way) like the one in the comment you quoted, is one of the most effective means to fight back against authoritarianism et al. Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” or go against establishment opinion. Sorry but we don’t haven’t take what they give without pushing back a bit. We’re not going to just roll over and take it.
- funkHouse 5y ago
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > Hence why many sites are banning or censoring comments that are “mean” Sites have always had terms of service. If you're seeing them enforced more often, it's because we've reached the end of the laissez-faire enforcement experiment for several key large sites; they attempted to maximize what was allowed, and found they had facilitated an attempted coup in their headquarters country, which would not be in their best interests.
  - coolso 5y ago
    Yet apparently, facilitating the burning down, rioting, and violence in cities across the country in the name of (allegedly) a convicted felon who died of a heart attack while restrained by police after attempting to drive on public streets high on fenty and meth, is in their best interests. Also, you... think this just started after January of last year? And that everyone who thinks differently than the establishment idea of what is "right" is part of that group? Interesting. You only further my point. The truth is, it has been happening for a while, but certainly sped itself up when the establishment realized that allowing people to freely spread ideas and opinions very likely resulted in that really mean tweeter winning, rather than the person they wanted to win, and that to ensure that the only ideas considered "correct" moving forward are allowed to propogate, that comments either needed to be disabled, or heavily regulated, by the very smart, very good people in Big Tech, who cried tears of frustration and anger after the Cheeto won. [0] [0]: https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-reveals-negative-reactions-trumps-election-1119490 https://www.newsweek.com/google-vs-trump-leaked-video-reveal...
evandwight 5y ago
How good are mice models? My uneducated thoughts are they are unlikely to generalize to humans - like testing carcinogens in petri dishes
- omginternets 5y ago
  "It depends." I really can't answer more precisely than that without knowing what you consider to be a "good" model, and what you are interested in modeling. Perhaps a marginally more useful answer is that they can be _excellent_ metabolic and cellular models. It's a case of "if you know what your looking for, you can pick animal models that effectively have exactly what you're looking for". The "what", here, would be a metabolic pathway, for example.
  - evandwight 5y ago
    Ah. That makes sense. It's a tool that tests certain things. My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans? To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      >My question was what percentage of results in mice generalize to humans? Accuracy is very high when you are studying a metabolic pathway that is (near)identical in humans and in mice. >To confirm I'm interpreting your answer directly. It depends on how the scientists use the tool. It is good at verifying certain aspects but not others. Yes. More precisely: animal models are accurate when the metabolic machinery in humans is also found in the animal model.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  I don't know if these issues have been fixed but here's a study that looked into all types of animal studies for cancer for an overview and suggested fixes and listed notable failures. There is one study here that showed a promising cancer treatment in mice used at 500x dilution in humans and it caused systemic organ failure in humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3902221/
foerbert 5y ago
I disagree. It is relevant, and not lowering level of discourse. Animal models are both very useful and very limited. There is no way to 'adjust' them into such a perfect proxy that the model is irrelevant. You can do better, but at the end of the day the most important adjustment to make is to keep in mind that it is in fact... in mice. While "... in mice!" can get a little jokey at times, the alternative is often a discussion that more or less assumes that the smallest of effects in any model are directly actionable information for the readers. It's not. Even with human studies, a single study is rarely enough to come to strong conclusions. In an ideal world, sure, it's just a repetition of facts everybody knows because everybody read and understood the article before engaging in the discussion at all (even just reading). But that's unrealistic on multiple fronts. Until that's a reasonable assumption, I'm more than happy to see some reminders of important facts in the comments. Even if it spawns the occasional joke.

stevenwoo 5y ago

For sucrose, mice apparently have the opposite reaction that primates have in this study. Maybe the guys who did the linked study didn't read it. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)00376-4 https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...

imchillyb 5y ago
> For sucrose, mice apparently have the opposite reaction that primates have in this study. Maybe the guys who did the linked study didn't read it. @stevenwoo Did YOU read the study, because it seems as if you may have skipped the very beginning reading... This is a direct quote. > The association of glucose with survival is inverse for mice versus monkeys/humans. That is -not at all- what the study in this post is reviewing, and is not the conclusion you're purporting. The study you linked looks at how glucose and aging work together. The study in this post is looking to how glucose affects the brain function itself, and what inhibitors are triggered by high-sucrose in a diet. > he high-sucrose diet induced microcapillary impairments and reduced brain glucose uptake in brains of Glo1-deficient mice. Aspirin protected against this angiopathy, enhancing brain glucose uptake and preventing abnormal behavioral phenotypes. Similar vascular damage to our model mice was found in the brains of randomly collected schizophrenia and bipolar disorder patients, suggesting that psychiatric disorders are associated with angiopathy in the brain caused by various environmental stresses, including metabolic stress. That's a direct quote from this post's linked study. These two studies are dissimilar enough to be completely different in comparison and their conclusions are not similar because the studies look at different effects of sucrose. This post's linked study looks at immediacy and how the sucrose interacts with the brain. Your post looks at the effects of aging and possible links to high-sucrose and fasting diets.
- stevenwoo 5y ago
  You're right, I had multiple tabs open reading different studies and confounded a bit of them, but I'll leave my original comment as is.