4 ms·

> in mice deficient for glyoxalase-1 (GLO1), an enzyme involved in detoxification of sucrose metabolites. This is for me the missing part of the title. I ofte

> in mice deficient for glyoxalase-1 (GLO1), an enzyme involved in detoxification of sucrose metabolites. This is for me the missing part of the title. I often think reading pop science that they’re making absurd shortcuts and we should get to the actual report, but here TBH I am reading the study and don’t really understand what I’m looking at or what’s the take from this, apart that mices with specific deficiency got some specific illnesses. I saw mentions of human brain analysis but it didn’t seem to go beyond sheer comparison. Does anyone see more interesting stuff in this piece ?

vericiab 5y ago
Someone who works in medical research once pointed out to me that some research is intended to be confirmatory (i.e. confirming a hypothesis) but other research is actually intended to be hypothesis-generating. This definitely seems to be the latter. My read on this is that we really don't know what causes things like schizophrenia, so much so that we're not even sure what to study to try to determine the cause. But the authors of this study found that a specific diet in mice with specific genes causes something that looks sort of like human psychiatric disease. They also found similar brain changes in both the mice and humans with psychiatric disease and that aspirin prevented some of the symptoms and brain changes in mice (which possibly suggests the brain changes are related to the behavioral symptoms and not just coincidental). Based on these results further study of, for example, GLO1 deficiency and/or the brain changes they found might be justified. So basically the takeaways are questions about whether/how these finding relate to human disease. In the end, like most hypothesis-generating studies this strikes me as vaguely interesting but probably only really meaningful to other researchers in the field.
aaron695 5y ago

vericiab 5y ago

Someone who works in medical research once pointed out to me that some research is intended to be confirmatory (i.e. confirming a hypothesis) but other research is actually intended to be hypothesis-generating. This definitely seems to be the latter. My read on this is that we really don't know what causes things like schizophrenia, so much so that we're not even sure what to study to try to determine the cause. But the authors of this study found that a specific diet in mice with specific genes causes something that looks sort of like human psychiatric disease. They also found similar brain changes in both the mice and humans with psychiatric disease and that aspirin prevented some of the symptoms and brain changes in mice (which possibly suggests the brain changes are related to the behavioral symptoms and not just coincidental). Based on these results further study of, for example, GLO1 deficiency and/or the brain changes they found might be justified. So basically the takeaways are questions about whether/how these finding relate to human disease. In the end, like most hypothesis-generating studies this strikes me as vaguely interesting but probably only really meaningful to other researchers in the field.

aaron695 5y ago