9 ms·
Turns out lowly thymus may be saving your life
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xeromal 3y agoI've always felt us removing things like tonsils and appendix without a high barrier was always premature. I remember kids wanting to have their tonsils removed to eat ice cream for a few weeks. lol. Even if we have legacy parts in out body, I'm fine just letting it fester in my body as long as it's not trying to kill me. Feels very similar to thinking farming just needs 3 nutrients. Turns out better farming requires a lot more. I am just a plain old bozo though so I could be talking out me ass
- hsur8192 3y agoIt appears that Chesterton’s Fence applies to bio-science as well!
- xeromal 3y agoVery applicable to programming too. I'm pretty conservative as a programmer and I've had coworkers want to completely change a segment but you never know why some weird programming was done. There be dragons sometimes.
- jaggederest 3y agoAs a software engineer who has sometimes specifically specialized in handling dragons, I always try to leave (sometimes voluminous) comments about why a thing was handled that way when it's not obvious to a surface reading. Good practice in general but particularly so when you find a heisenbug that must be exterminated.
- tgv 3y agoThe ice cream was to ease the pain. The cold calms the exposed nerves.
- xeromal 3y agoMakes sense. I was very jealous of my friends at the time but I never took mine out. I just get mad tonsil stones now. lol
- orev 3y agoThey did not express any indication that they didn’t understand why ice cream is often recommended, so you don’t need to be explaining it. The point of the comment is that kids don’t understand what’s going on, only hear about the ice cream thing, and then want the same procedure just so they can eat ice cream for a week.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- randomdata 3y agoExcept they demonstrated interest in the response. Further, they are not the only person who reads the comments. Others may be interested to know the relationship between ice cream and tonsils.
- tjohns 3y agoThe ice cream was a lie. After I had my tonsils removed, even the thought of solid food was out of the question. It was just too painful. You can have as much ice cream as you want. What they don't tell you is you won't want any. :P
- maximilianburke 3y agoI think we're getting better about non-surgical interventions when it's not necessary. Appendicitis can, and is, treated with antibiotics, but the timing has to be spot on otherwise it needs to come out. I had to have mine removed because by the time I was seen in the hospital it had already burst. I think the only time that people pre-emptively remove appendixes is when you can't risk the chance of a burst; like if you're the over-winter physician at Amunden Scott South Pole station
- bluepod4 3y ago> Appendicitis can, and is, treated with antibiotics Yeah, kids don’t get tonsils removed anymore either. Just antibiotics.
- ReallyAnonymous 3y agosurgeon here: antibiotic treatment works great as long as there's no peritonitis and/or no appendicolith seen on CT. However, statistics show that 30% of successfully treated patients go on to get appendicitis again within 1 year. Anyway, I offer my patients a choice. Most choose surgery. Those conscientious enough without insurance usually choose nonoperative management because it's much cheaper.
- nicup12345689 3y agoThe 30% is because people do not change their diet so they'll once again be susceptible.
- robbiep 3y agoNo it’s not, you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. There isn’t an ‘appendicitis’ diet
- nicup12345689 3y agoWho said that there is an appendicitis diet? The fact is they eat a certain way, and got appendicitis. Are we to pretend all diets are the same? Am I to pretend it is a religious mystery/miracle and no ones knows? Or genetics? Please, enlighten us...
- hinkley 3y agoI had my tonsils out for what at the time we thought was legitimate reasons, but well after they started phasing out the practice. I recall when I woke up my throat didn't hurt (possibly due to painkillers), and when they brought ice cream and popsicles to sooth my pain I felt like a fraud. But the experience up to that point was traumatic to put it lightly, so you're damned right I was going to get all of the treats I could wrangle.
- readthenotes1 3y agoChesterton's Fence
- outworlder 3y ago> I've always felt us removing things like tonsils and appendix without a high barrier was always premature. Add circumcisions to the list.
- midoridensha 3y agoThere was never a medical reason for those, only religious. American doctors tried to invent a medical reason, but those are the same doctors who told people that smoking is good for you because the tobacco companies paid them to.
- stephen_g 3y agoThere are some medical reasons (I know from experience) post-puberty, just not for doing it at birth.
- midoridensha 3y agoSorry, I forgot to mention that; you're absolutely correct, but that's for a tiny number of people who actually have some medical problem where circumcision is a viable remedy. I meant medical reasons for doing it to all male infants as some sort of preventative procedure.
- Auracle 3y agoPre-puberty here, and as someone that was about 4 years old when my circumcision was done I can absolutely understand how ancient peoples would decide just to do every baby boy on the off chance they’d need it later.
- stephen_g 3y agoTrue, during the healing process I had the same thought! Would have been rather more convenient to have just had it done as a baby even if I hadn’t needed it!
- 3y ago
- stefantalpalaru 3y ago[dead]
- gadflyinyoureye 3y agoWhat are the chances that I'd see two things about the thymus in a week? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVoxfABoHh4&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVoxfABoHh4&t=2s This covers a paper that, while small in sample size, shows a reduction in age of 6 years. One of the major impacts of the drug cocktail is that it removes much of the fat that accumulates in the thymus as one ages.
- autokad 3y agoI was wondering that. what about people who have less fat? what if we stop it from fattening? etc. good video
- spandrew 3y agoThis type article declaring a thymus revelation is published every few years. We've known the thymus is saving our lives — it's where the t in t-Cells derives from for years. There are very old studies of removing it from older humans and statistically seeing a decline in health. Most doctors will not remove it without a decent cause in older patients (intractable infection, for example). In those cases it's not that removing the thymus was a good approach. It was just the least-bad approach the physician had on hand to help their patient. Never forget that everything we do, medically, is a stall. I'm glad we have blood pressure pills and better health spans than our grandparents. Eat a healthy diet, run 3 times a week, manage stress and... die anyway. That's the deal we were given as living things.
- xixo 3y agoI wish I could say my dad's thymus is saving his life, quite the opposite. He was discharged from the ICU/hospital yesterday after he nearly died from a "myasthenic crisis"—an event that most people with Myasthenia Gravis (MG) will experience. From what I understand, his thymus produces antibodies that destroys receptors connecting the nerves and muscles. He can't keep his head up, eyelids up, can't swallow and during the crisis could not breathe. Interestingly, a small portion of MG patients have an enlarged/tumorous thymus and end up getting it removed, though there aren't necessarily clear benefits. It's also a quite invasive procedure they wouldn't perform on older folks like my dad (he shows no signs of it anyway). Overall I agree with you though—this article is not saying anything new. As a concerned son who's spent more than his fair share of time trying to understand what's going on here, I wish it did. I also wish there were some treatments for my dad that worked. For now, exercising, eating healthy, lowering stress, and a healthy dose of steroids are currently keeping him with us. If anyone has advice, I'm all ears.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dan000892 3y agoMy mother was diagnosed with MG 25 years ago. Her first symptoms were droopy eyelid and double vision. Plasmapheresis helped, Prednisone had nasty side effects (glad to hear that sounds not to be the case for your father), prismatic glasses to un-double her vision kind of helped? As her symptoms increased—-speech delay, difficulty swallowing, eye misalignment, all stemming from fatigue-induced nerve conduction delays which can culminate in respiratory failure—-myasthenic crisis, they opted for thymectomy (open surgery). She was probably 50 and while the recovery was lengthy, it drastically improved her symptoms and the amount of activity she could do before arose symptoms appeared. No more prism glasses or multi-second speech delays, or weekly plasmapheresis visits. If she spent too much time being active or driving on a sunny day (squinting), she’d feel the ocular fatigue first and know she had to rest or take a prednisone. Now her eyes are failing for other reasons but the thymectomy bought her 25 years and counting. I’m glad your father survived his crisis. It sounds like you’re doing all of the conservative treatments (which is good; steroid noncompliance is a risk factor for crisis). There are new medications that directly reduce or deactivate AChR antibodies. Non-invasive video-assisted thoracoscopic thymectomy is more viable today too (and thymectomy has been shown to decrease the frequency and severity of crises even where the thymus was considered normal). Plasmapheresis remains generally effective, if time consuming. MG sucks. From one son to another, I hope you can get a few more good decades with your parent too.
- Calavar 3y agoThis is a fluff piece. We've known for decades that the thymus is an important part of the immune system. It's not an organ that's been believed to be vestigial, like the appendix. > For the study, Kooshesh mined data from 1,146 adult patients who had undergone thymus removal, alongside demographically matched control patients who had undergone similar surgeries but kept their thymus Sure, you can demographically match all you want, but I don't think this is a research question that can be answered with a retrospective analysis. The problem is that you haven't controlled for why surgeons decided to remove the thymus in some cases and not in others. Was the disease more severe in patients who got thymectomies? Was it differences in training between the surgeons? Was it just an arbitrary decision on the part of the surgeons? This is a critical confounder regardless of whether you've matched the demographics. You really need a randomized control study to answer this sort of question. > Although the risk of autoimmune disease did not differ substantially between the groups in the overall primary cohort (relative risk, 1.1; 95% CI, 0.8 to 1.4), a difference was found when patients with preoperative infection, cancer, or autoimmune disease were excluded from the analysis (12.3% vs. 7.9%; relative risk, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.2) What? What is this? Was this subgroup analysis preregistered, or did they just go fishing when their primary hypothesis didn't pan out? I'd categorize this study as mildly interesting, but not groundbreaking the way the press statement is selling it.
- mlyle 3y agoThis is a research question you can't answer with a prospective analysis either, because it's not ethical in most cases to randomize whether you're removing a body part. The best we're going to do is a careful case control study (and research in animal models). And the evidence is enough to imply strongly that we should expend a little more effort to avoid removing the thymus.
- Calavar 3y ago> This is a research question you can't answer with a prospective analysis either, because it's not ethical to randomize whether you're removing a body part. But that's exactly what we did with the appendix, multiple times [1, 2]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26080338/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26080338/ [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2014320 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2014320
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoAscorbic Acid, crucial to protecting the thymus: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25608928/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25608928/
- zingababba 3y agoI haven't dug deep into it but the TRIIM trial (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6826138/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6826138/) seemed to show promising results with a combination of rHGH, metformin, and DHEA on thymus regrowth.
- superbiome 3y agoPeter Thiel just needs to add in the metformin and DHEA and his thymus rejuvenation will be complete.
- LinuxBender 3y agoI've been doing this for some time but I replaced metformin requires RX with Berberine that is safer based on my research. less risk of lactic acidosis of the liver. I found that it's hard to find a sweet spot with DHEA. Too much leads to easy bruising.
- zingababba 3y agoI actually prefer pregnenolone to DHEA, I've found it to be more forgiving. I agree wrt Berberine, the lactic acidosis issue turned me off metformin as well. I believe it's the reason Peter Attia stopped using it also.
- mjfl 3y agoYou mean the place where your T cells mature and develop immune responses? Duh.
- DantesKite 3y agoThere's an amino acid chain synthesized from the thymus of a cow that helped double my lymphocytes (they were low for months). Called Thymic Protein-A. Readily accessible. One of the few things that made a change. Nothing else really helped me out. What I find interesting how the thymus becomes essentially a blog of fat as we get older and partially explains why infections tend to hit us harder as we age.
- cma 3y agoI can't remember what it was but there was a talk about some kind of tradeoff with thymus function and age that was supposed to explain its atrophy, something like pneumonia death vs auto immune or cancer or something? Edit: Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymic_involution#Unknown_selective_pressures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thymic_involution#Unknown_sele...
- jejones3141 3y agoSigh. Now I have to track down a copy of The Memluks' album Partida, so I can listen again to their classic "Joe's Thymus" (inspired, I'm sure, by the Readers' Digest "I am {Joe's, Jane's} [name of organ]" articles).
- charles_f 3y agoNot claiming it's wrong, especially because it looks like this is an important organ re: immune response, but > It is typically removed due to issues with the organ itself, such as thymus cancer > The magnitude of death and cancer in patients who had undergone thymectomy was the biggest surprise for me Isn't having had cancer the best predictor of having cancer in the future? And so if the main cause of Thymus removal is cancer, seeing cancer after its removal is not very statistically significant?