5 ms·

Afaict, 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/d41586-0

Afaict, 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 ago
It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Yeah, 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.
  - jychang 3y ago
    The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.
    - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
      Perhaps a first pass research question is: Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.
      - carlmr 3y ago
        >Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? In that case scarring/inflammation might trigger the Alzheimer's though. The interesting part in this article is that the growth hormone was not injected into brain tissue I assume.
    - tim333 3y ago
      There are quite a lot of diseases where a prion like mechanism is suspected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper: >recent cultured cell line and animal model studies suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to neighboring cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/
    - Thorrez 3y ago
- goku12 3y ago
  The article mentions that the procedure was banned due to incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That is a prion disease.
  - klipt 3y ago
    They still use pieces of cadaver for other surgeries. E.g. gum and bone transplants done by periodontists. Seems risky to me.
    - woleium 3y ago
      as long as it’s not spine or brain matter it’s probably okay. During the mad cow outbreak (BSE, the bovine equivalent of CJD) in the UK, they banned “beef on the bone” but not all beef.
      - emayljames 3y ago
        And CJD came about from farmers using ground and processed cow brains to feed cows. What could possibly go wrong feeding a cow some cow brains!
        ljf 3y ago
        It is worse than that - it first made the jump to cows when condemned sheep, infected with the similar prion disease 'scrapie', were ground up and fed to cows.
        meepmorp 3y ago
        There's a human prion disease, kuru, which was caused by the practice of funerary cannibalism - where family would ritually consume parts of their deceased relatives' bodies. The moral of the story seems to be, don't eat brains.
        adrian_b 3y ago
        Which is rather unfortunate. I no longer eat meat, but when I was younger I considered the brains as the tastiest part of an animal, when properly prepared and cooked. It is said that in USA eating organs is not very popular, so it is likely that many have never experienced well cooked brains, to know what they are missing. There exists a hypothesis that is rather plausible, that breaking bones and eating their content of brains and marrow has played an important role in the evolution of humans, by providing an abundant source of long-chain fatty acids, enabling the unusual mass ratio between the central nervous system and the whole body that characterizes humans.
- emayljames 3y ago
  What I found odd, is in the article it talked of the importance of sterilising medical tools used, that may have had prions on them. Prions can't even be destroyed by extreme temperatures, they are extremely scary.
  - kvgr 3y ago
    Over 900c for several hours vs 250 in autoclave... if Alzhaimers can spread this way, i am done, because I spent days in dentist chair...
seesawtron 3y ago
Both new and old articles are from the same lab. So they hypothesized it in previous article and now found signs of dementia in some of patients who survived. Still no evidence of actual transmission of A-Beta.
Zigurd 3y ago
Prions are exactly the tiny, hard to detect things that could make Alzheimers transmissible. There are likely to remain many questions to resolve, but this sure suggests a line of inquiry: Is Alzheimer's one distinct disease? Can a prion be isolated as the cause? Can a diagnostic test be designed that detects this prion? Etc.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection. Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to be very common. But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem negligent. (Which they are.)
  - rantallion 3y ago
    > There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. Except that there's increasing evidence that specific proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of dementia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/
    - angiosperm 3y ago
      It is possible that Alzheimer's is purely a matter of aberrant proteins. That would be valid conclusion if the evidence turned out to support it. But it is not a valid assumption under any circumstance.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  Have they found prions in Alzheimers patients universally? That would seem to have come up looooong ago given how much it has been studied.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

diob 3y ago

It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.

EdwardDiego 3y ago
Yeah, 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.
- jychang 3y ago
  The thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.
  - DoingIsLearning 3y ago
    Perhaps a first pass research question is: Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.
    - carlmr 3y ago
      >Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? In that case scarring/inflammation might trigger the Alzheimer's though. The interesting part in this article is that the growth hormone was not injected into brain tissue I assume.
  - tim333 3y ago
    There are quite a lot of diseases where a prion like mechanism is suspected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper: >recent cultured cell line and animal model studies suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to neighboring cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/
  - Thorrez 3y ago
goku12 3y ago
The article mentions that the procedure was banned due to incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That is a prion disease.
- klipt 3y ago
  They still use pieces of cadaver for other surgeries. E.g. gum and bone transplants done by periodontists. Seems risky to me.
  - woleium 3y ago
    as long as it’s not spine or brain matter it’s probably okay. During the mad cow outbreak (BSE, the bovine equivalent of CJD) in the UK, they banned “beef on the bone” but not all beef.
    - emayljames 3y ago
      And CJD came about from farmers using ground and processed cow brains to feed cows. What could possibly go wrong feeding a cow some cow brains!
      - ljf 3y ago
        It is worse than that - it first made the jump to cows when condemned sheep, infected with the similar prion disease 'scrapie', were ground up and fed to cows.
      - meepmorp 3y ago
        There's a human prion disease, kuru, which was caused by the practice of funerary cannibalism - where family would ritually consume parts of their deceased relatives' bodies. The moral of the story seems to be, don't eat brains.
        adrian_b 3y ago
        Which is rather unfortunate. I no longer eat meat, but when I was younger I considered the brains as the tastiest part of an animal, when properly prepared and cooked. It is said that in USA eating organs is not very popular, so it is likely that many have never experienced well cooked brains, to know what they are missing. There exists a hypothesis that is rather plausible, that breaking bones and eating their content of brains and marrow has played an important role in the evolution of humans, by providing an abundant source of long-chain fatty acids, enabling the unusual mass ratio between the central nervous system and the whole body that characterizes humans.
emayljames 3y ago
What I found odd, is in the article it talked of the importance of sterilising medical tools used, that may have had prions on them. Prions can't even be destroyed by extreme temperatures, they are extremely scary.
- kvgr 3y ago
  Over 900c for several hours vs 250 in autoclave... if Alzhaimers can spread this way, i am done, because I spent days in dentist chair...

seesawtron 3y ago

Both new and old articles are from the same lab. So they hypothesized it in previous article and now found signs of dementia in some of patients who survived. Still no evidence of actual transmission of A-Beta.

Zigurd 3y ago

Prions are exactly the tiny, hard to detect things that could make Alzheimers transmissible. There are likely to remain many questions to resolve, but this sure suggests a line of inquiry: Is Alzheimer's one distinct disease? Can a prion be isolated as the cause? Can a diagnostic test be designed that detects this prion? Etc.

angiosperm 3y ago
There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection. Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to be very common. But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem negligent. (Which they are.)
- rantallion 3y ago
  > There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins. Except that there's increasing evidence that specific proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of dementia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/
  - angiosperm 3y ago
    It is possible that Alzheimer's is purely a matter of aberrant proteins. That would be valid conclusion if the evidence turned out to support it. But it is not a valid assumption under any circumstance.
EasyMark 3y ago
Have they found prions in Alzheimers patients universally? That would seem to have come up looooong ago given how much it has been studied.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]