16 ms·
Alzheimer’s cases tied to no-longer-used medical procedure
- m3kw9 3y agoI thought it was still early in 2024 and we have this news but good to know you need to actually transplant brain matter to get it
- Terr_ 3y ago4 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179368 Recycled comment follows. ___________ To highlight: > The authors and other scientists stress that the research is based on a small number of people and is related to medical practices that are no longer used. Also that there is zero-reason to believe in any person-to-person spread: > The study does not suggest that forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease can be contagious. Lastly, a fun vocabulary word [not in that article]: "Iatrogenic" - An illness caused by medical examination or treatment.
- admissionsguy 3y agoAnother one is "nosocomial" - (disease) originating in a hospital
- dekhn 3y agoDon't forget nosocomial- infections acquired in a healthcare setting.
- rajup 3y agoMy understanding was the beta-amyloid hypothesis itself is under some amount of scrutiny and may not truly explain Alzheimer's. Wonder if this finding adds more evidence for the amyloid hypothesis.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI thought CJD was caused by a prion. Was it in the growth hormone prep from the cadavers?
- treyd 3y agoYeah that's correct. The article mentions a few cases of people who died from transmitted CJD that may have also received some beta amyloid or tau proteins that could have catalyzed development into Alzheimer's if only they didn't die from CJD, which seems to develop more quickly through that route. If Alzheimer's is truly is some kind of prion-related disease, which the research is suggesting.
- kibibu 3y agoFrom the article: > In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of protein into recipients’ brains. In some cases, it had induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD — a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years ago.
- caycep 3y agothere's transmissible CJD, but most cases are a genetic version where you get the prions from your own cells and then it cascades, if I recall
- m3kw9 3y agoNot sure why scientists has to pin point a single cause where as you have different vectors that can cause the same disease is also plausible
- pedalpete 3y agoOr that we've been lumping multiple different types of cognitive decline as a single disease.
- hmottestad 3y agoCan’t you make a definitive diagnosis from an autopsy. Could be that multiple diseases lead to the same findings in the autopsy. While someone is alive a diagnosis of Alzheimers is more of a diagnosis of elimination. There are several drugs that can be used to slow the progression and I assume that those have a role to play in solidifying the diagnosis.
- hackernewds 3y agoThat ventures wildly into whether the realm of physicalism explains malaises that happen in the "consciousness" realm. spooky
- tsimionescu 3y agoYou can check for amyloid plaques in an autopsy, but apparently plenty of old people that show no significant cognitive decline also have amyloid plaques. So, while we would definitively call it Alzheimer's if you have significant cognitive decline + amyloid plaques, it's not 100% clear that this is a single diagnostic.
- arcticfox 3y agoThey don't, but my surface understanding is that the medicines that effectively nuke beta amyloid have no effect overall. Which would mean it's not even one of many causes, it seems to not be a cause at all.
- 3y ago
- scythe 3y agoThis finding definitely supports a brain protein hypothesis, but it could just as easily point to tau protein as amyloid. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399531/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399531/
- xenadu02 3y agoThe short version as I understand it: amyloid plaques are a symptom but not a cause. There was a theory floating around that they're a neurological immune response to viral infection but I don't think there's enough evidence to prove that yet.
- m-i-l 3y agoSlightly more clickbaity title than the BBC's "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases"[0] which also says "The findings do not mean Alzheimer's is infectious - you cannot catch it from contact with people who have it... The researchers say all of the people in their study had been treated as a child with cadaver-derived human growth hormone, or c-hGH, that was contaminated with brain proteins that are seen in Alzheimer's disease... used to treat at least 1,848 people in the UK between 1959 and 1985". [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68126907 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68126907
- caconym_ 3y agoI didn't find it clickbaity at all. The contents of the article were exactly what I expected based on the headline, and I didn't know this was possible. The really interesting thing here is that Alzheimer's seems to be transmissible from person to person via biological material. The BBC headline you quoted, "Medicine stopped in 1980s linked to rare Alzheimer's cases", totally buries the lede and is borderline misleading.
- eek2121 3y agoI didn't either, and I didn't even read the article. The headline was actually dead on factual for me.
- oli-g 3y agoFor me as well, and I didn't even read the headline.
- jessriedel 3y agoMy reading is that m-i-l is using "clickbaity" to mean "doesn't prevent all possible wrong conclusions one could draw from the headline". (In this case, the wrong conclusion would be thinking that because there exists cases of alzheimer being transmitted through some mechanism that Alzheimer was contagious.) While it's certainly understandable that we are all tired of clickbait that purposefully misleads the reader, imo we should not overcorrect by demanding that headlines cannot be misinterpreted by arbitrarily ignorant readers.
- bjourne 3y agoAfaict, this is not an entirely new finding. For example, this page (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07771-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07771-6) references a 2018 article about the issue of Alzheimer's being transmitted (or rather "seeded") through growth hormone extracted from cadavers. Perhaps the new article provides additional evidence or perhaps the other article only suspected a casual link and this one proves that there is one. I haven't read it thoroughly. What I find interesting and scary is the "seeding" part. The small amount of growth hormone injected to the children cannot itself have caused Alzheimer's. But it must have caused some rewiring of the brain to make it accumulate more plaque which over a period of many decades slowly decreased their brain performance. If this effect is synthesizeable then one can easily imagine many countries using it to develop terrifying biological weapons.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diob 3y agoIt mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint: > The far wider relevance of prion mechanisms was first exemplified with the discovery of yeast prions but has also widened considerably with the recognition that the more common human neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, involve accumulation and spread of assemblies of misfolded host proteins in what is often described as a ‘prion-like’ fashion with experimental transmission of relevant pathology in primates or mouse models. However, the importance for human disease was unclear until the recognition of human transmission of amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology via iatrogenic routes after prolonged incubation periods, causing iatrogenic cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and raising the possibility that iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease may occur at even longer latency.
- aurizon 3y agoNew prion diseases are being found in other animals and might evolve to enter humans. There is a deer version being watched - not yet found in people, AFAWK? https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cwd/index.html There have been many cases of assorted Human Papilloma viruses (HPV) transmitted by kissing as well as assorted variances of oral sex. Recent vaccines are very effective.https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/public/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/public/index.html
- CommanderData 3y agoDo you mean HSV? I have seen articles implicating that virus but it's the first time I've heard of a HPV association.
- aurizon 3y agodifferent to HPV. More on HSV https://www.healthline.com/health/herpes-simplex#causes https://www.healthline.com/health/herpes-simplex#causes
- caconym_ 3y agoWhat do these two things have to do with each other?
- aurizon 3y agoNot much, deer prion wasting disease is forced shape-fold mimicry and HPV is DNA insertions affecting repressed cancer causing genes having increased expression. I referenced it, but it does not really fit in.
- genman 3y agoSo is this small bit of information any use for figuring out the general case?
- Reubend 3y agoYes, definitely. It hints to the root cause being "very similar in many respects to what happens in the human prion diseases like CJD, with the propagation of these abnormal aggregates of misfolded proteins and misshapen proteins." So while this might be unrelated to the general cases, it's still a promising area of investigation.
- jollyllama 3y agoWhy isn't the procedure used anymore, since they stopped using it before this was discovered?
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoBecause it was shown to also spread a prion disease (CJD, though not the variant kind as far as I have understood)
- Reubend 3y agoAs the article says, there is now a synthetic hormone which is given to the patients. We don't need to extract the hormone from dead people anymore.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoYes, but that just would cause the derived product not to be needed, when it was actually actively banned because it was proven to have caused some cases of CJD.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skissane 3y agoWe worked out to produce these hormones (or equivalent compounds) synthetically, so we no longer need to extract them from the brains of deceased humans, a procedure which risks transmitting disease. Not just human growth hormone, also other hormones used to be derived this way, e.g. those used to induce ovulation in fertility treatment. I know someone who received cadaver-derived fertility hormones in the 1980s. She has a small risk of developing CJD and dying from it. It hasn't happened yet, and probably never will, but no one can say for sure if she is infected. If you don't develop symptoms (some people are infected but never progress, others suddenly develop symptoms one day after decades of being asymptomatic), the only way to know for sure if you had it is at autopsy, through destructive testing of brain tissues.
- munificent 3y ago
- jovial_cavalier 3y agoI've often wondered if Alzheimer's is actually novel instances of prion disease. For instance, Kuru was developed within I think a handful of generations in a population of ~20,000 with limited opportunities for transmission (only transmitted when someone dies and their family eats their brain). If the base incidence rate for a novel prion is that high, can you explain Alzheimer's as just that? It would be sad news for pharmaceutical companies - it would render Alzheimer's as a disease in the same class as cancer. Total systems breakdowns that are low-probability but inevitable on a long enough timescale.
- karmajunkie 3y agoit’s almost certainly not, or you would see epidemiological evidence for chains of transmission. prion diseases require contact transmission which is all but absent from the alzheimer’s story.
- throwaway8877 3y agoIs it still possible that the chains are there but are missed because of the disease very slow progress?
- jovial_cavalier 3y agoWe don't eat the brains of people with Alzheimer's, so we don't see it transmit? I know CWD transmits from pretty much any shedding of the animal, but is that necessarily universally true? Can we map that onto human beings who practice hygeine and don't eat leaves that another human urinated on?
- karmajunkie 3y agoconsumption of neural tissue isn’t the only transmission vector though. (See TFA for an example, in fact.) If it were a prion disease, just the law of averages dictates that we’d see some transmission from things like organ transplants from pre-symptomatic carriers. There’s no evidence of that at all that i’m aware of. (disclaimer: I work at a startup in cognitive testing, so while i’m certainly not a researcher in the field, i do see quite a bit of research on dementia-adjacent diseases)
- boringuser2 3y agoI actually don't believe this conclusion based off the fact that it would be slam-dunk evidence for the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's, which we don't have.
- echelon 3y agoMultiple pathways could lead to the disease. It's entirely possible that a metabolic dysfunction or viral origin causes immune dysfunction and the downstream dysregulation, misfolding, amyloid/tau signals, etc. There might be multiple entry points to causing this disease.
- boringuser2 3y agoThat might be true, but I don't think this makes the conclusion any more compelling because it now fails Occam's razor. Chances are greater the conclusion is simply incorrect.
- echelon 3y ago> it now fails Occam's razor. I mean, mechanistically speaking, so does cancer. I don't think that's quite the lens to apply to biological systems. Biology is wildly complex and subverts expectations all the time.
- boringuser2 3y agoIt is the lens to apply to any system. You don't defend a tenuous conclusion by doubling down with a tenuous defense. "Science" is constantly inaccurate. I can pull two papers right now with opposing conclusions. Assuming a scientific conclusion is simply incorrect is a pretty good bet, even if you have absolutely no context or idea what is happening at all.
- echelon 3y ago> It is the lens to apply to any system. I can point to countless instances where it fails to adequately guide investigation in biology. Occam's razor leads to premature simplification. When the space is vast, dynamical, and unknown, it's absolutely not a tool. Do you think, for instance, that V(D)J recombination satisfied Occam's razor when we asked ourselves how adaptive immunity worked, or how some forms of diseases such as SCID manifested? There is a metric ton of pure serendipity in the study of biology. We're drawing new connections between systems all the time. This is just a new data point.
- eigenvalue 3y agoI wonder what other stuff is being unwittingly transferred during standard blood transfusions. I've seen some interesting research about the "signalling" power of blood from both older and younger donors, with the "young blood" causing a slow down of senescence in cells, and the "old blood" causing a speed-up in senescence. Any time you take biological material out of other human beings and put them in a different body, it seems like you are introducing a lot more uncertainty and risk than when you inject a person with a comparatively "simple" small-molecule drug.
- axus 3y agoMy mom developed an allergy to eggs after a blood transfusion. She long regretted never being able to eat another chocolate eclair.
- eigenvalue 3y agoThat’s nuts. Seems like researchers should look really closely at weird side effects of blood transfusions since these are effectively “natural experiments” that would be impossible or unethical to run normally.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoThey do. These incidences are rare, but documented, and researched. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-peanut-allergy-comes-from-a-blood-transfusion/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-peanut-aller... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562830/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562830/ It looks like the allergy isn't permanent though.
- kccqzy 3y agoGenerally, I think if a patient needs blood transfusions there's a bigger and more immediate life-and-death problem right there. I think allergies would be preferable to death. Is my understanding correct? I hope blood transfusion hasn't become a routine procedure these days.
- geocrasher 3y ago[flagged]
- caycep 3y agoThere is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e. one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc after subjects passed several years later and got autopsied, they found clumps of parkinsonian proteins (lewy bodies) on the histology slides of the implanted stem cells. Similarly, there's some papers w/ mice w/ knockout Parkinsonian genes getting parkinsonian features and lewy bodies when injected w/ abnormal misfolded synuclein from another mouse. What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.
- secondcoming 3y ago[flagged]
- jurynulifcation 3y ago[flagged]
- ra 3y agomakes it hard to read
- s1artibartfast 3y agoread it somewhere else?
- foota 3y agoI guess if your brain proteins are mixing with someone elses you normally have a bigger issue.
- knodi123 3y agoI don't know where your neuro-jack is installed, but if it's not in the skull then I don't know how you even connect to the all-mind.
- jokoon 3y agoweird that the bulk of patients are in france and UK, does that indicate diet?
- EdwardDiego 3y agoAll the researchers are all UK based, and the UK became verrrry interested in prion diseases due to a very bad habit UK agriculture had gotten into of incorporating culled animals (other cattle, which furthered the spread, but the ultimate cause was likely grinding up sheep infected with scrapies, an ovine spongiform encephalopathy) supplementary cattle feed for animals later eaten by humans which led to the CJD outbreak in the UK. European agriculture also had a similar bad habit, but maybe less sheep or scrapies or something? France probably imported British beef and so were affected also. They certainly banned it the longest afterwards. And I was about to do the usual Kiwi thing of "Just let the cows eat grass, duh", but every Western country tends to supplementary feed dairy cows, including mine, except we prefer to use palm kernel, thus promoting deforestation in Borneo, yay! But it turns out a lot of British beef comes from their dairy herds, so "just feed the beef cattle grass" wouldn't have helped.
- the_optimist 3y agoA compelling book on this topic: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deadly-Feasts/Richard-Rhodes/9780684844251 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Deadly-Feasts/Richard...
- coffeebeqn 3y agoCows are also fed “sewage solids” from water treatment plants. Now that I think about it maybe I should stop eating / drinking cow products
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago[flagged]
- EdwardDiego 3y agoI'm not sure it's anywhere as widespread as you think it is, or why it's relevant to this apart from "it too involves medicine" and, well, people are researching medical interventions longitudinally full-time, so I suspect it'll be analysed accordingly. Interesting that you've prejudged it to be clearly bad, I'd wait for scientific evidence of that.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoScientific evidence is already emerging: https://archive.is/lUUQi https://archive.is/lUUQi Big time issues with bone density. People in their 20s breaking hips and developing osteoporosis. That's not okay.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoThat makes sense.
- StimDeck 3y agoThat depends on if you are familiar with the concept of trade-offs and recognize that the alternatives could have been worse.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoNot sure I want to dignify your snarky response but are you implying that there are only two possibilities; suicide or taking a handful of pills with untold consequences?
- caconym_ 3y agoAre puberty blockers extracted from the brain matter of cadavers?
- 3y ago
- inasio 3y agoAlzheimer's as a (transmittable) prion disease is the stuff of nightmares (prion disease == incurable)
- gustavus 3y agoI'll admit that I am somewhat ignorant here. But I thoughts the "Alzheimer's is caused by plaque buildup in the brain" theory was on its last leg and pretty much disregarded by most new scientists.
- devmor 3y agoI am also a layman but I believe I’ve read that its no longer believed to be caused by the plaque, but the plaque is a clear signal/comorbidity of the underlying cause - whatever it is?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fastball 3y agoI'm somewhat surprised by this publication's restraint when referencing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as usually news orgs like mentioning the fact that Creutzfeldt-Jakob is the human form of mad cow disease.
- yungporko 3y agoit does say that that BSE is the bovine equivalent of CJD in the article
- radium3d 3y agoHmm, I wonder if the same could occur from a bone graft from a cadaver, like for a tooth implant?
- LASR 3y agoI wonder what other practices from decades ago are lurking to be discovered as catastrophic to currently living people. I remember reading about cattle rearing practices a while ago that might be responsible for some prion related diseases. Can’t remember the exact source. These things get you from entirely unrelated sources.
- Gare 3y agoThere was a whole epidemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak
- lswank 3y ago"Is it circumcision?" I love how this is what people say when reading over my shoulder.
- anthk 3y agoThanks to CIC Biogune too for the early research: https://www.cicbiogune.es/news/us-alzheimer-association-funds-cic-biogune-research-aimed-identifying-new-approach-early https://www.cicbiogune.es/news/us-alzheimer-association-fund...
- hackernewds 3y agoI thought the beta ameloid theory was largely debunked since the publisher had manipulated data. Now it's attached again? I'm so confused
- tim333 3y agoIt's complicated. Read all about it https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid...
- caesil 3y agoThis is one of the reasons that, despite no direct evidence of harm, I will only ever take marine collagen instead of bovine collagen. Do not fuck with the possibility of ingesting cow nervous system tissue, let alone human.
- dmead 3y agoTell that to my heart valve. All bovine baby.
- yungporko 3y agowhy is cow or hunan nervous system tissue particularly dangerous? what animal is marine collagen from and why is it less dangerous?
- ultra_nick 3y agoPrions. Non-mammal prions have a different enough shape to avoid breaking mammalian biomechanisms.
- lazide 3y agoWild Chronic Wasting Disease + hunting also seems like a bomb waiting to explode sometime. But, somehow, it hasn’t into humans yet.
- dukeofdoom 3y ago[flagged]
- elcook4000 3y agoThis is really fascinating, horrifying and hopeful at the same time. It makes sense that some neurodegenerative diseases with unknown etiologies are caused by prions or prion-like proteins. It could be fruitful to study the rate of Alzheimer's among nursing assistants who work in elder care. I found a few resourcas stating a higher rate for caregiver's in general along with nurses. I have thought decreased immune function from aging leads to the increased permeability of the blood brain barrier: which leads to the infiltration of pathogens and now possibly prions. I would assume this could be, or possibly has been, studied in animal models.
- tim333 3y agoFrom my limited understanding the blood brain barrier doesn't really stop things. However it is difficult to transmit from one person / animal to another usually resulting from things like transplants or being injected in.
- elcook4000 3y agoI just did a brief search and found this article related to the increased permeability of the blood brain barrier with aging. https://immunityageing.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12979-015-0029-9 https://immunityageing.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1... Research into chemical agents that induce or inhibit this would also be of interest.
- sebazzz 3y agoPrions are most scary bit of biology there is. Almost impossible to eleminate, causes victim proteins to unfold.
- parsabg 3y agoSounds like a sensible next step would be to try and replicate this in animal models (i.e. treat animals with growth hormones extracted from cadavers of same species) to identify the proteins/prions that trigger the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's, which could perhaps be drug targets for at least a subset of AD causes.
- Qem 3y agoIf they still have some samples of this old, corpse-sourced hormone, perhaps they can analyse them to try isolate candidate compounds.
- emayljames 3y agoFor CJD the testing isn't needed, it is established that cows eating processed cow brains caused the outbreak.
- meindnoch 3y agoprions
- lasermike026 3y agoGive me the friggen files. Here is a hard drive.
- troyvit 3y agoThis "one weird trick" will eat your brain!
- DrNosferatu 3y ago…Michael J. Fox?
- LindaR 3y ago[dead]
- martin82 3y agoGuys, don't get distracted by all the new mysterious causes of Alzheimers. Alzheimers is "brain diabetes". You get it from a lifetime of eating carbs and developing insulin resistance. Big pharma and big agriculture will never want you to know this, so it will take years before this becomes common knowledge.
- mariaerica 3y ago[dead]
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