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Scientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agoonce they solve 'aging' they can proceed to solve 'childhood' then we can stay adults forever, thereby ceasing to exist
- danielskogly 3y agoLink to paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ade5892 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ade5892
- Madmallard 3y agosame mechanism for decline in the rest of the body???? Surely oxidation and dna mutations accumulating affects the brains similarly to how it affects everything else.
- HeWhoLurksLate 3y agoI mean I'm sure that eventually entropy will claim all of us, but it'd be really cool to be able to help people maybe not extend their life times but be less miserable during them I think I would hate losing my cognitive function if I realized it was slipping away a lot more than needing to use a wheelchair
- withinboredom 3y agoIIRC, brain cells don’t divide, so “random DNA changes” don’t apply, at least not in the way it would in the rest of the body. I could be totally wrong, I’m not a brain scientist.
- hollerith 3y agoA cell still needs its DNA (to make proteins among other things) even when it is not dividing.
- withinboredom 3y agoThey asked about “compared to the rest of the body” and I was explaining (to the best of my knowledge) why it doesn’t work the same.
- hollerith 3y agoI know
- Etheryte 3y ago...in mice.
- carrolldunham 3y agoPeople just jump to say this like it's a game now. The headline says 'may have found the mechanism'. It's not claiming anything that needs this
- DyslexicAtheist 3y agoso "scientists baffled and confused" would have been more accurate :) edit: I'm overthinking this, but the word "scientists" does a lot of heavy lifting in the headline. The number of things the human race in general and scientists especially are unsure about is vast. Putting a person in a white overcoat, spectacles, and pen in their pockets to lead the sentence with authority doesn't give them a chance of not looking dumb. Scientists in media language are 100% of the time more clownish than even politicians or any other profession. Even the content in itself is garbage, in which case the headline does justice, or there was in fact something news-worthy but the meta-analysis by this article has missed it.
- Aaargh20318 3y agoDue to the way medication is developed, we basically only end up with medicine that works on humans + at least one other species. I wonder how many medications we have missed out on that would have worked on humans but never got to the human trial stage because it doesn’t work in any of the animal models we use.
- haldujai 3y agoThis isn’t a medication it’s a mechanism study. I would expect not many and certainly far less than the number of medications that worked in animals but did not work or harmed humans.
- PaulKeeble 3y agoAnd a condition we can induce in another animal. If we can't cause it in another animal then we can't test a drug against it. There are a lot of diseases that can make no progress under this model which we can not induce in animals or humans.
- DyslexicAtheist 3y agoScientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging, but there shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment that one may confuse with clickbait.
- digitcatphd 3y agoThanks for the TL;DR
- jdthedisciple 3y agoLiterally every science headline these days. But tbf who said science was easy? You can't force definitive results, shit's just complex.
- Chinjut 3y agoI'm having a very hard time understanding this comment. Perhaps my cognitive decline has begun. Update: I see I should rewatch "Life of Brian".
- krn1p4n1c 3y agoAt this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before around eight o’clock.
- coldtea 3y agoAlternative medicine salesmen touting BS loosely based on the research: Behold the gourd!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sfn42 3y agoIf your headline includes the word "may" in this fashion, it's not a headline. Come back when you have real news.
- Swenrekcah 3y agoI prefer this to the two alternatives of either not letting anyone know what you may have found or confidently exaggerating the results.
- mdp2021 3y agoWhy, that research is not interesting enough to you? That would be you - it is not universal. There are positive findings, and new research and practical openings. "«May»" there means: "we have positively found leads". It is not "random".
- xchip 3y agoEverything goes when you use the word "may"
- jdthedisciple 3y agoI may have upvoted your comment.
- swalsh 3y agoI've noticed a cognitive decline in myself the past couple years. I'm in my mid 30's though so I assume it's more related to long covid. One of the biggest side effects of long covid for me was horrible insomnia, which was killer. The insomnia is mostly gone, but I'm still not my previous cognitive self. It's terrifying to be honest.
- agloe_dreams 3y agoAlso, get checked up for Sleep Apnea. It is a truly life-ruining condition whose primary side effect is lost memory and cognitive function.
- jpcfl 3y agoHoly shit this. I went years undiagnosed. Saw a dozen doctors. Couldn’t get an clear explanation for why I was always tired, brain fog, vision problems, joint pain, memory issues. The list goes on. Then my _dentist_ of all people ordered a Watch-PAT take-home sleep test (took a lab sleep test, but it was useless) which finally revealed I was having more than 10 events per hour. The dentist made me a Herbst appliance to hold my airways open during sleep. My life is 100x better now.
- deprecative 3y agoThis is one of the most frustrating things about the US. This shit is expensive. Sure, for a lot of us making bank in the software field we tend to lose sight of that. I got laid off (yay hyper-capitalist bonus chasing management). I'm reading this thread and seeing plenty of things that would be great from a health perspective but let's be real. They're all out of reach for me. Fortunately, that's temporary for myself. I'm sure I'll be back to making bank within a year or two. Most folks however? This advice will permanently be out of reach.
- RobotToaster 3y agoSo, how do we stop it?
- jdthedisciple 3y agoGolden rule with anything health-related: 1. Fix sleep 2. Drink water 3. Have Magnesium, Zinc, Vitamin D, and natural proteines 4. Move your behind
- vasco 3y agoIf you die early enough you should be able to prevent any cognitive decline, or at least experience it all at once and very fast.
- RobotToaster 3y agoHmm, anything with fewer side effects?
- LoganDark 3y agoI wonder if one could even guarantee a quick and early death without suicide. I assume if you join the military or something, if you get shot on the battlefield you could end up surviving with extreme pain, or bleeding out over a long period of time, neither of which are particularly desirable. There are various ways to go to sleep and never wake up, but I'd assume anything you did intentionally would be suicide. Some people aren't against committing suicide, but assuming you were someone who's afraid of death (so can't just commit suicide) but still doesn't want to live into their later years, what could you even do? I assume just increase the chance of accidents, but what kind of accident would result in death with minimal suffering?
- DANmode 3y agoExotic extreme sports, to answer your question. But, most people I've come across that are outward with this attitude say they smoke tobacco to help, and have a suicide method all planned out and ready to go as a guarantee.
- getarofilter 3y ago[dead]
- freehorse 3y ago> Researchers using mouse models found that altering the CaMKII brain protein caused similar cognitive effects as those that happen through normal aging. This should be the title of the article. Honestly these supposedly dissemination articles do not offer much more than reading the abstract or skimming a bit through the article itself. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ade5892 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ade5892
- isaacfrond 3y agodoesn’t quite fit in HN’s 80 character limit though
- koheripbal 3y agoBecause the authors only read the abstracts.
- onurcel 3y agoRealistically, with the title you suggest nobody would have read the post. A title is not "the most informative and complete sentence summarizing the article", it also has the goal to stimulate curiosity. I understand that we don't want misleading titles but this obsession on titles is not very helpful. I am participating in this useless conversation but I couldn't help myself. Now every single HN post has a comment on how the title is wrong..
- JoshuaDavid 3y agoHow about > Researchers found aging-like cognitive effects in mice by altering the CaMKII brain protein Only 3 more words than the original, but contains quite a bit more information about what exactly the claim is while still having a strong "hook".
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> A title is not "the most informative and complete sentence summarizing the article", it also has the goal to stimulate curiosity. Are you advocating clickbait?
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThe article suggests that decline in nitric oxide availability as you age under pins the effect studied. Citrulline has been found to be an effective route for improving nitric oxide levels by synthesizing into arginine, which is destroyed in the gut while citrulline is not and readily converts into arginine. https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2125.2007.02990.x https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1... … in humans
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- astrange 3y agoIsn't the mechanism behind anything in aging "entropy"?
- LoganDark 3y agoHonestly, this is basically it. The organisms that supposedly don't suffer from aging, are probably just better at accounting for entropy.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat does that mean?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nemo44x 3y agoOver time things break down and don’t work as well. Some organs cope with this better than others. This is how I read it.
- Teever 3y agoHow would you turn this theory of aging into some sort of action? This theory means nothing if it can't be tested, if we can't act on it in some way.
- astrange 3y agoSecond law of thermodynamics?
- submeta 3y ago[flagged]
- jeffybefffy519 3y agoI really want to know, why don't we all supplement with L-arginine long term? Time-release capsules are available and I have taken for numerous issues like RSI to great success. Whats the downside to long term usage?
- salad-tycoon 3y agoSide bar : L citrulline is thought to be more effective than arginine. One downside that I don’t see discussed much, as I’ve watched multiple recalls over recent years for supposed contamination of things like tmao and other toxins in either the manufacturing process or packaging process, I wonder how many supplements are contaminated. I have never seen an analysis even from the vendors who do pretty hefty chemical composition analysis.
- esperent 3y ago> I wonder how many supplements are contaminated. I have never seen an analysis even from the vendors who do pretty hefty chemical composition analysis. Why do you think food supplements would be more contaminated than other processed foods? Or even things like toothpaste or shampoo, those are also made from highly processes ingredients.
- fao_ 3y agoThere's a large amount of precedence, that's why. Rather than asking the room, one would think the first step would be to obtain information and inform yourself. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5753965/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5753965/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34022259/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34022259/ https://theconversation.com/natural-supplements-can-be-dangerously-contaminated-or-not-even-have-the-specified-ingredients-131021 https://theconversation.com/natural-supplements-can-be-dange...
- ThinkBeat 3y agoThe brain is an extremely complicated I think they may have found one mechanism or one part behind the cognitive decline in aging. I am certain there are several different processes that contribute to it and finding all of them and then mitigating those may have side effects in other parts of the brain. I have an extremely speculative and not based on science that the brain simply is not meant to function forever. We extend life in various ways, and we get better at it. Perhaps in a couple of decades people will live (be kept alive) for 100 years on average. (well those who live in a country where such medication and treatment is available and at some level affordable) But human evolution has not caught up with the prolonged life span since living that long has been an exception for 300.000 years and looking farther back in evolution probably millions of years
- justdep 3y agoI've been seeing this headline for 20 years
- jdthedisciple 3y agoThe thing about its wording is: It was true every single time.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI'm glad they are still working on it, and have for 20+ years.
- PeterStuer 3y agoUnfortunately CaMKII also promotes cancer cell propagation. Typical evolutionary tradeoff it seems.
- Roark66 3y agoIn mice! Seriously, is it so difficult to add those two words in the title?
- mdp2021 3y agoThat would change the title into your reading. The title is literal. Pharmacological treatments are proposed - for humans.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThat would change the title into your reading. What does that mean? The title is literal. It is literally incomplete and the missing context changes the entire meaning. Pharmacological treatments are proposed - for humans. This isn't what the title says or implies.
- mdp2021 3y ago> What does that mean? If one added that specification, it would change the meaning that David Kelly seems to have intended. (It would change it to what the poster understood.) Kelly does not seem to restrict the matter to mice, as Uli Bayer does not seem to. > This isn't what the title says or implies It is what the submitted divulgational article from the University writes, and the title follows.
- welder 3y agohttps://www.jax.org/why-the-mouse/excellent-models https://www.jax.org/why-the-mouse/excellent-models
- danduma 3y agoIN MICE
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Tycho 3y agoI’m not sure what the proper name is for this idea, but I consider ageing to be a trade-off between cell-regeneration, which maintains youthfulness, and mutation-limitation, which reduces the chances of cancer. That is to say, if you “aged less”, you would get cancer more/sooner. Everything else, like the balance of chemicals in the body, I assume would be downstream of that.
- herval 3y agoI'm not a biologist, but I believe what you're talking about is telomerase?
- dillydogg 3y agoTelomeres are just repeats at the end of chromosomes to allow for replication. They aren't directly involved in replication fidelity beyond allowing for replication to proceed. I guess protecting genes near chromosome termini but that's different than the mutations you would expect in cancer.
- herval 3y agomy understanding is cancer gets more prevalent when the telomeres get old (short?), since it leads to more mutations/botched replication?
- dillydogg 3y agoI'm sorry for the delay, but this actually isn't quite right. Short telomere syndromes are not associated with cancer. In fact, it is long telomeres that have a strong association with cancer (largely because aberrantly activating telomerase can drive cancer development.) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22965356/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22965356/ for more on short telomere syndromes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- avereveard 3y ago> May article like these come out dozen per year, and it's all putative unless they can make a pill out of that knowledge
- mensetmanusman 3y agoHere’s to solving aging and room temperature superconductivity in the same year.
- smallerdemon 3y agoFingers crossed that it can actually be replicated in future studies and research. We definitely don't want another nearly 20 years of false path ass busting research based on falsified documentation like we ended up with on Alzheimer studies.
- koheripbal 3y agoI thought the fraud did not invalidate the results and that plaque was still considered the primary cause. In fact, wasn't there a drug recently released that demonstrated that?
- DANmode 3y agoDid it demonstrate plaque as cause, or effect (that gets cleaned up with meds)?
- roflc0ptic 3y agoNo. There was a drug released that targeted that pathway, but the approval in and of itself was a scandal - I spoke with a pharmacist last night who said people at her hospital were disgusted by the FDA’s decision. It was removed from the market two weeks later. There was basically no evidence of efficacy.
- 93po 3y agoFDA approves stuff all the time that has no efficacy
- roflc0ptic 3y agoNot in the face of such overwhelming evidence; it’s literally their job to make sure things are effective. It turns out medical studies are weaker evidence than anyone would like, but here there was quite compelling evidence that it was useless!
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- MagicMoonlight 3y agoEventually we will reach a point where humans are immortal. They’ll still die if they’re shot or clog their arteries etc but they won’t die purely based on running down a clock. There’s no inherent reason we have to die. It’s an evolved strategy to allow newer models to replace us. Turn that off and you’d stay around until physical damage and irreparable decay takes you out. It will be interesting from a societal standpoint. You’ll have the real scum people wanting free immortality and people arguing they should get it even though they’re horrible. You’ll have the rich people who want to keep it to themselves because the poor don’t deserve it. Things like prison sentences and the general value of time would all be messed up.
- kyriakos 3y agoImmortality raises a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we will need to tackle if it ever becomes real. For example, if you live 200 years, how much would you remember of your first 30 years of life? Will that 200 year old person still technically be the same as the one that was born if he hardly remembers anything?
- throw__away7391 3y agoNo it doesn't. I'm a good bit younger than 200 and barely remember large portions of my earlier life already. What's so special about 200 that makes it any different?
- acters 3y agoIn another comment I spoke about how many more people are able to reach 60+ years of age, and that the amount of people living longer have exponentially grown. Our world population reaching another billions milestone at faster timeframes. Scarily, life expectancy was always at around 20-30 years for a large portion of history for humans.(most who reached 15 years of age were capable of living to 50 years albeit they were considered to be outliers) Around neolithic times, we had moved towards increasing population density and promoting growths. This time period was odd as it lowered the overall life expectancy because there were more humans that died from other methods as lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary lifestyles. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles required loads of land for a single human to survive, which the neolithic era had been able to fix with the introduction of farming. Due to density, more people started attacking one another for variety of reasons and heavily relied on farm crops to sustain increased human populations. Societal growth of centers such as towns and cities then countries continued. Excluding many outliers, life expectancy only started to rise in the 1950s and has kept further increasing past 50+ years and 60+ years. So yes there is something special about reaching 200 years of age. As it will singal a milestone no other human has ever reached from all of history. On the other hand, life expectancy growing at an alarming rate is putting a lot of strain on resources and land availability.
- Mistletoe 3y ago>Normal aging reduces the amount of nitric oxide in the body. That in turn reduces nitrosylation which decreases memory and learning ability, the study said. Has viagra shown affects at reducing normal aging in the brain? It seems to do so in the heart. https://news.vcu.edu/article/Nitric_Oxide_release_triggered_by_Viagra_is_key_to_heart_protection https://news.vcu.edu/article/Nitric_Oxide_release_triggered_...
- cheald 3y agoCialis has been linked to mitigation of cognitive decline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6705107/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6705107/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53136-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53136-y And Viagra has been identified as a potential tool against Alzhimers: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00138-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00138-z https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease-reports/adr200166 https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-... Ideally, we'd identify the key mechanisms at play and be able to develop lifestyle modifications that would support them, but it's pretty cool that these drugs have benefits beyond just better bedroom performance.
- zug_zug 3y agoNo offense to everybody upvoting this type of thing, but claims like this seem to outweigh any actual tangible result by 100 or 1000 to 1. I think it's a better use of everybody time to say "Well, let's just wait until it's replicated in humans until we share articles"
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoIt's possible people vote up articles like these because they want skeptical readers to analyze them. (I don't do that, and I don't know anyone else's HN voting habits, but it seems at least plausible.)
- mmcnl 3y agoI'm more interested to hear what discoveries have lead to meaningful results. There are a lot of news articles on potential medical breakthroughs but I have no idea how medicine is actually advancing.
- hotdogscout 3y agoI've been reading gesture recognition papers that claim to be real time and I've yet to see one I can reproduce in real time or reproduce at all. The necessary hoops to jump when writing a scientific study seem to be very different from the hoops to advance a field.
- hollerith 3y agoAgree. Also, cognitive decline has been studied intensively enough that if there were a single mechanism responsible for most human instances of it, the science around that single mechanism would've been settled by now. Instead what we seems to have is a disease where toxins, chronic infections by bacteria, viruses and fungi, cardiovascular health, genetic variability (e.g., apoE4) and metabolic-lifestyle factors like insulin resistance and lack of sufficient exercise are all important. But HN likes to upvote these announcements written by PR departments at universities.
- macintosh-hd 3y agoNah, surely we found a room temperature super conductor and solved one of the most major aspects of aging all in 1 week!
- Ensorceled 3y agoApparently we should add "in mice", "single study", "small study" and about 14 other disclaimers to every HN title about science. If you care desperately about "in mice" find a less "general interest" news source.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> Apparently we should add "in mice", "single study", "small study" and about 14 other disclaimers to every HN title about science. That would be nice, yes. Otherwise there's an endless stream of "revolutionary" discoveries that turn out to be nothing.
- Zetice 3y agoAnd what a tragedy that would be. Positively unrecoverable, we might end up remembering we’re not experts, this is not a scientific website, and fun/excitement/entertainment is a good thing.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI don't think it has to be as binary as "nothing" or "we found the cure for cancer". we do these experinebts on mice due to similar-ish brain chemistry. It hopefully leads to controlled human studies and then we start devloping medicine that way. It's always a process.
- mellosouls 3y agoIts not about caring desperately about "in mice", it's about respecting HN as a feed of articles that represent their titles. The underlying study that this PR hype piece is advertising does not, and correctly includes "in mice".
- YurgenJurgensen 3y ago“Room temperature superconductivity discovered in mice.” would be an interesting turn of events at least.
- coldtea 3y agoThose kind of articles (and papers) would be far more impactful if they were used only when they actually referred to some major real breakthrough. As opposed for us to read 1000s of them in the span of 10 years, and nothing ever coming out of them - except 200 more articles like that from other teams, on other competing mechanisms. What about a more real title: "Scientists found a potential mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging, but it's more likely that they have not, the area of study is very complex and ill-understood still, and it will take decades at best to discover and verify any definitive mechanisms. More likely this study also has methodological errors or these guys are even padding their numbers to get a paper published and secure more grants". Yes, it's a mouthful. How about "Researchers find a way to induce cognititive decline in lab animals. Don't hold your breath for human relevance".
- UhUhUhUh 3y agoResearch now more or less always proceeds bottom-up so that it's never possible to determine causality from results. Everyone looks for causality, researchers look for positive results and the wheel keeps on turning. When top-down thinking disappears, science enters a cognitive decline of its own. This one is contagious.
- freediver 3y agoAnyone else finding news headlines with the word 'may' in them obnoxious?
- Animats 3y ago> He pointed out that this would only work in normal age-related cognitive decline, not the decline seen in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. That's an important distinction. Alzheimer's disease is a specific problem, separate from long-term cognitive decline. That the mechanisms of both have been identified is real progress. One way medicine progresses is by differentiating causes of the same symptoms. Then specific treatments can be worked on.