4 ms·

Beyond headlines of transmitted Alzheimer's, scientists see case for prions

57 points by consumer451 3y ago

giantg2 3y ago
Prions are concerning. We know very little about them and have no cures. There are forms for common animals that we eat, like cows. Our processing of these animals leads to 100s or 1000s of unique DNA being identified in a single package of ground beef. They do not test for BSE unless the cows are symptomatic, but it's unlikely they would be symptomatic when they have a typical market time of only 18 months. BSE is thought to be a potential cause of CFJ in humans. In my opinion, our industrialization of the food supply will lead to mass prion distribution/infection at some point.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jajag 3y ago
  It already has with the BSE crisis, and I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came. I remember there was period in the UK back in the nineties where there was the grim prospect of hundreds of thousands of cases - thankfully it never came close to that. And there are European countries where I still can't donate blood, because I lived in the UK during the outbreak.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    "I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came." That's basically my point. It doesn't seem like we changed our practices that much. I would have thought we'd test the animals, process them separately, etc.
    - gustavus 3y ago
      My understanding is that one of the changes we made is we stopped feeding cow brains to other cows, which was the root cause of the problem.
      - consumer451 3y ago
        My personal pet theory was that prions are an evolutionary mechanism which prevents cannibalism in mammals. I know nothing about evolutionary biology, and I wonder if there is any chance that this is true.
        kaikai 3y ago
        One of the first thing you learn in evolutionary biology is that evolution doesn’t have intent.
        consumer451 3y ago
        Yeah, I guess even I know better than that and should have chosen my words more carefully.
        nrdvana 3y ago
        Also not a biologist, but as I understand it: Every living creature synthesizes proteins. Every time you synthesize a protein, there is a tiny tiny chance that it synthesizes "backward". Backward proteins are physically incompatible with "forward" proteins, and also increase the risk that more proteins synthesize backward. It leads to a cascade of errors where lots of proteins synthesize backward and the cells and internal structures can no longer function. It's like you fall apart due to half your Lego bricks being upside-down. And, this is all a statistical probability that could occur in any moment to any living organism. The evolutionary defenses are to break apart all incoming proteins and reassemble them yourself, and have a cycle of life that starts new organisms from scratch. Large carnivores can't hope to break apart every incoming protein, though. So, basically our lifespans and reproduction method of growing up from a single cell are the evolutionary defenses against the natural phenomenon of prions. But yes, prion disease is probably what forces all higher foodchain animals to avoid cannibalism.
    - sigmoid10 3y ago
      There were lots of changes that permeated far beyond Britain. There was a time when every cow was tested in Germany if it was merely alive during the time when contaminated animal-based feed was going around, even if it wasn't fed anything like that. The EU only lifted general testing like 10 years ago - 20 years after the original outbreak. People have also completely stopped using the kind of feed ingredients that allow transmission of the disease to livestock intended for human consumption in most parts of the world. It was a shitty situation, especially in Britain, and many people there probably still carry the disease without knowing it because it can take up to 50 years to show symptoms. That's also the reason why many countries still won't allow you to donate blood if you lived in Britain at the time as the other comment mentioned. So saying that we didn't learn from it or changed nothing is just wrong. Another outbreak like the original one is basically impossible in the western world.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  Prions are indeed very concerning on a concrete per-instance basis, but —unlike viruses— not that concerning in the abstract as a generic threat. Prions as a phenomenon do not exploit an essential feature of our metabolism, and cannot 'evolve' per se, but are limited to the specific cases in which a) a given protein sequence can stably misfold rendering it ineffective, b) exposure of already functionally 'eufolded' proteins to the misfolded one can trigger subsequent misfolding, and c) misfolded versions of the protein can and do consistently come in contact with non-misfolded functional ones. I'm not trying to downplay the threat and incredible difficulty of preventing known prion diseases, particularly with regards to destroying the infectious prions. However, to illustrate the rarity of the phenomenon on a per-protein basis, consider how the processes involved in cooking have themselves been denaturing (i.e. mifolding) an unimaginable number of all kinds of proteins in a myriad of ways all since human prehistory, and yet we have no known examples nor even hints of new prions having been created in the process.
  - lumost 3y ago
    The mass processing of food could be the additional mechanism allowing mass distribution of prions, no? Through processed foods, an apex predator like humanity comes into contact with proteins from several orders magnitude more animals than our ancient hunter gatherers or farmers. This problem is compounded as our livestock eat processed foods themselves. Perhaps prions were not as dangerous for most of evolutionary history as they simply lacked a distribution vector?
    - consumer451 3y ago
      > The mass processing of food could be the additional mechanism allowing mass distribution of prions, no? My grandmother was from "the old country" and would never allow us to buy ground meat in a package. She made us ask the deli to grind her selected cuts, in front of her. Back then, I wrote this off as some kind of old world silliness. I remember being embarrassed about the whole kerfuffle. I know she wasn't thinking of prions, just contamination in general. Now I realize that I was the silly one, and she was very wise.
sigmoid10 3y ago
The headline is wrong. The case is not for prions, but for prion-like behaviour in amyloid beta plaques. They found that this could have been a cause of transmission in rare cases where people received hGH sourced from contaminated cadavers and 5 out of 1800 developed early onset Alzheimer's. But they also had 200+ other people develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which is actually known to be caused by prions. So there might be some similarity that enables transmission in a related way. Or there might just be related symptoms. Either way, it is completely irrelevant for normal people, unless you eat squirrel brains or ground up beef imported from Britain in the 90s.
- amluto 3y ago
  Unless I missed something, it’s weaker than that. What’s the evidence that the contaminant that transmitted Alzheimer’s was amyloid beta or even a related substance? The hGH was inadequately purified. It seems likely to have contained multiple different contaminants.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    That's why I explicitly said could in italics. Because not even that is certain.
- jeswin 3y ago
  > But they also had 200+ other people develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob Goodness! 200 out of 1800 subjects developing CJD is the scariest thing I saw in that study. It isn't many folds away from being an extinction level threat. Makes me worry about exponentially rising compute capability. > Either way, it is completely irrelevant for normal people, unless you eat squirrel brains or ground up beef imported from Britain in the 90s. Most cases of CJD we see are sporadic CJD. It's rare, but also the scariest struggle I've ever seen.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
It’s interesting how popular Alzheimer’s research is on HN. I don’t really see any other website talk about it. I have multiple grandparents who were destroyed by it. I guess it is a scary future to look to
- tyfighter 3y ago
  I appreciate that HN follows the research, and have wondered if others have had the same experience as me. My mother was diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimer's at age 57 in 2013. The progression was slow at first, but it was a major problem for our family by 2017, and she died at 65 in 2022. My dad died of health issues seriously exacerbated by grief of what had happened. It destroyed my family. I'm still in my 30s and both of my parents are gone. This all happened during what are supposed to be the most critical years of a person's tech career. I am almost done with handling my parent's affairs, and am preparing to make major changes to my life again. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease that is going to wreck havoc on the lives of of countless millenials/genzs as their baby boomer parent's age into it. We need to understand this disease as soon as possible.
y-c-o-m-b 3y ago
> The nuance, thankfully, is far less frightening, at least from a public health standpoint. A case series published Jan. 29 in Nature Medicine by scientists at University College London reported that five patients who were given growth hormones derived from human cadavers as part of a now-obsolete childhood medical treatment later developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. I'm currently under investigation of early-onset dementia due to significant cognitive decline in the last year or so with the earliest of symptoms being noticed about 6 years ago. This topic is particularly interesting because I had a cervical spine fusion 6 years ago with a cadaver bone used from an elderly patient. That was the beginning of my journey in hell. It seems extremely unlikely that was a route for transmitting anything to me, but nevertheless the topic posed in this article and the underlying reference articles makes me wonder. If anything, I'm grateful that it's being looked at more closely.
- aantix 3y ago
  I'm sorry that you're going through this. I know this is a shot in the dark, I posted this the other day. There's a correlation between poor oral hygiene and dementia/Alzheimer's. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-health-may-help-protect-against-alzheimers https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt... My dad had an infection in his teeth and died with cognitive decline. The infection isn't always visible, even with a standard X-ray from the dentist. You'll want to get a "cone CT scan". Not every dentistry will have this equipment. But it's your best bet for finding a festering, chronic dental inflammation.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Brush and floss religiously, folks. Tooth bacteria can migrate and be implicated in all sorts of shit: heart disease, colon cancer, dementia.
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      It’s also very likely there are sins microbiomes that are more stubborn than others, where this advice isn’t effective We need more effective easily accessible solutions
bentt 3y ago
That could be the most annoying mobile site I can remember. The number of popups and re-layouts is ridiculous.

57 points by consumer451 3y ago

Prions are concerning. We know very little about them and have no cures. There are forms for common animals that we eat, like cows. Our processing of these animals leads to 100s or 1000s of unique DNA being identified in a single package of ground beef. They do not test for BSE unless the cows are symptomatic, but it's unlikely they would be symptomatic when they have a typical market time of only 18 months. BSE is thought to be a potential cause of CFJ in humans. In my opinion, our industrialization of the food supply will lead to mass prion distribution/infection at some point.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jajag 3y ago
It already has with the BSE crisis, and I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came. I remember there was period in the UK back in the nineties where there was the grim prospect of hundreds of thousands of cases - thankfully it never came close to that. And there are European countries where I still can't donate blood, because I lived in the UK during the outbreak.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "I'm not sure if we 100% understand how close to a much greater crises we came." That's basically my point. It doesn't seem like we changed our practices that much. I would have thought we'd test the animals, process them separately, etc.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    My understanding is that one of the changes we made is we stopped feeding cow brains to other cows, which was the root cause of the problem.
    - consumer451 3y ago
      My personal pet theory was that prions are an evolutionary mechanism which prevents cannibalism in mammals. I know nothing about evolutionary biology, and I wonder if there is any chance that this is true.
      - kaikai 3y ago
        One of the first thing you learn in evolutionary biology is that evolution doesn’t have intent.
        consumer451 3y ago
        Yeah, I guess even I know better than that and should have chosen my words more carefully.
      - nrdvana 3y ago
        Also not a biologist, but as I understand it: Every living creature synthesizes proteins. Every time you synthesize a protein, there is a tiny tiny chance that it synthesizes "backward". Backward proteins are physically incompatible with "forward" proteins, and also increase the risk that more proteins synthesize backward. It leads to a cascade of errors where lots of proteins synthesize backward and the cells and internal structures can no longer function. It's like you fall apart due to half your Lego bricks being upside-down. And, this is all a statistical probability that could occur in any moment to any living organism. The evolutionary defenses are to break apart all incoming proteins and reassemble them yourself, and have a cycle of life that starts new organisms from scratch. Large carnivores can't hope to break apart every incoming protein, though. So, basically our lifespans and reproduction method of growing up from a single cell are the evolutionary defenses against the natural phenomenon of prions. But yes, prion disease is probably what forces all higher foodchain animals to avoid cannibalism.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    There were lots of changes that permeated far beyond Britain. There was a time when every cow was tested in Germany if it was merely alive during the time when contaminated animal-based feed was going around, even if it wasn't fed anything like that. The EU only lifted general testing like 10 years ago - 20 years after the original outbreak. People have also completely stopped using the kind of feed ingredients that allow transmission of the disease to livestock intended for human consumption in most parts of the world. It was a shitty situation, especially in Britain, and many people there probably still carry the disease without knowing it because it can take up to 50 years to show symptoms. That's also the reason why many countries still won't allow you to donate blood if you lived in Britain at the time as the other comment mentioned. So saying that we didn't learn from it or changed nothing is just wrong. Another outbreak like the original one is basically impossible in the western world.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
Prions are indeed very concerning on a concrete per-instance basis, but —unlike viruses— not that concerning in the abstract as a generic threat. Prions as a phenomenon do not exploit an essential feature of our metabolism, and cannot 'evolve' per se, but are limited to the specific cases in which a) a given protein sequence can stably misfold rendering it ineffective, b) exposure of already functionally 'eufolded' proteins to the misfolded one can trigger subsequent misfolding, and c) misfolded versions of the protein can and do consistently come in contact with non-misfolded functional ones. I'm not trying to downplay the threat and incredible difficulty of preventing known prion diseases, particularly with regards to destroying the infectious prions. However, to illustrate the rarity of the phenomenon on a per-protein basis, consider how the processes involved in cooking have themselves been denaturing (i.e. mifolding) an unimaginable number of all kinds of proteins in a myriad of ways all since human prehistory, and yet we have no known examples nor even hints of new prions having been created in the process.
- lumost 3y ago
  The mass processing of food could be the additional mechanism allowing mass distribution of prions, no? Through processed foods, an apex predator like humanity comes into contact with proteins from several orders magnitude more animals than our ancient hunter gatherers or farmers. This problem is compounded as our livestock eat processed foods themselves. Perhaps prions were not as dangerous for most of evolutionary history as they simply lacked a distribution vector?
  - consumer451 3y ago
    > The mass processing of food could be the additional mechanism allowing mass distribution of prions, no? My grandmother was from "the old country" and would never allow us to buy ground meat in a package. She made us ask the deli to grind her selected cuts, in front of her. Back then, I wrote this off as some kind of old world silliness. I remember being embarrassed about the whole kerfuffle. I know she wasn't thinking of prions, just contamination in general. Now I realize that I was the silly one, and she was very wise.

sigmoid10 3y ago

The headline is wrong. The case is not for prions, but for prion-like behaviour in amyloid beta plaques. They found that this could have been a cause of transmission in rare cases where people received hGH sourced from contaminated cadavers and 5 out of 1800 developed early onset Alzheimer's. But they also had 200+ other people develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which is actually known to be caused by prions. So there might be some similarity that enables transmission in a related way. Or there might just be related symptoms. Either way, it is completely irrelevant for normal people, unless you eat squirrel brains or ground up beef imported from Britain in the 90s.

amluto 3y ago
Unless I missed something, it’s weaker than that. What’s the evidence that the contaminant that transmitted Alzheimer’s was amyloid beta or even a related substance? The hGH was inadequately purified. It seems likely to have contained multiple different contaminants.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  That's why I explicitly said could in italics. Because not even that is certain.
jeswin 3y ago
> But they also had 200+ other people develop Creutzfeldt-Jakob Goodness! 200 out of 1800 subjects developing CJD is the scariest thing I saw in that study. It isn't many folds away from being an extinction level threat. Makes me worry about exponentially rising compute capability. > Either way, it is completely irrelevant for normal people, unless you eat squirrel brains or ground up beef imported from Britain in the 90s. Most cases of CJD we see are sporadic CJD. It's rare, but also the scariest struggle I've ever seen.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

It’s interesting how popular Alzheimer’s research is on HN. I don’t really see any other website talk about it. I have multiple grandparents who were destroyed by it. I guess it is a scary future to look to

tyfighter 3y ago
I appreciate that HN follows the research, and have wondered if others have had the same experience as me. My mother was diagnosed with Early-Onset Alzheimer's at age 57 in 2013. The progression was slow at first, but it was a major problem for our family by 2017, and she died at 65 in 2022. My dad died of health issues seriously exacerbated by grief of what had happened. It destroyed my family. I'm still in my 30s and both of my parents are gone. This all happened during what are supposed to be the most critical years of a person's tech career. I am almost done with handling my parent's affairs, and am preparing to make major changes to my life again. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease that is going to wreck havoc on the lives of of countless millenials/genzs as their baby boomer parent's age into it. We need to understand this disease as soon as possible.

y-c-o-m-b 3y ago

> The nuance, thankfully, is far less frightening, at least from a public health standpoint. A case series published Jan. 29 in Nature Medicine by scientists at University College London reported that five patients who were given growth hormones derived from human cadavers as part of a now-obsolete childhood medical treatment later developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. I'm currently under investigation of early-onset dementia due to significant cognitive decline in the last year or so with the earliest of symptoms being noticed about 6 years ago. This topic is particularly interesting because I had a cervical spine fusion 6 years ago with a cadaver bone used from an elderly patient. That was the beginning of my journey in hell. It seems extremely unlikely that was a route for transmitting anything to me, but nevertheless the topic posed in this article and the underlying reference articles makes me wonder. If anything, I'm grateful that it's being looked at more closely.

aantix 3y ago
I'm sorry that you're going through this. I know this is a shot in the dark, I posted this the other day. There's a correlation between poor oral hygiene and dementia/Alzheimer's. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-health-may-help-protect-against-alzheimers https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt... My dad had an infection in his teeth and died with cognitive decline. The infection isn't always visible, even with a standard X-ray from the dentist. You'll want to get a "cone CT scan". Not every dentistry will have this equipment. But it's your best bet for finding a festering, chronic dental inflammation.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Brush and floss religiously, folks. Tooth bacteria can migrate and be implicated in all sorts of shit: heart disease, colon cancer, dementia.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    It’s also very likely there are sins microbiomes that are more stubborn than others, where this advice isn’t effective We need more effective easily accessible solutions

bentt 3y ago

That could be the most annoying mobile site I can remember. The number of popups and re-layouts is ridiculous.