8 ms·

An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear

• helsinkiandrew 1y ago
  https://archive.ph/20250718060542/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/what-scientists-learned-scanning-the-bodies-of-100-000-brits https://archive.ph/20250718060542/https://www.bloomberg.com/...
• senectus1 1y ago
  thats a cool study. there should be more like it. (thanks for the archive link btw!)
• chithanh 1y ago
  > What UK Biobank is revealing, scan by scan and layer by layer, is that disease doesn’t arrive out of nowhere. It accumulates quietly, shaped by genes, environment, and habits. I think that is already known for a while. It's called functional reserve, and was a big topic in HIV patients (and then again for SARS-CoV-2). Like people with higher cognitive capabilities will be protected by those a bit longer before onset of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorder (or even dementia). Same for kidneys: They have a functional reserve that you are born with gets used up during life, until it is gone. Acute kidney disease treatment is aimed at preserving whatever little function is left.
  • readthenotes1 1y ago
    A very elderly doctor referred to "cognitive reserve", lamenting hen had more of it when younger.
  • tsoukase 1y ago
    Functional reserve means you are completely well but the start of the disease is coming closer as the former is depleting. Another case is when disease starts subtly and slowly _with_ initial symptoms that are otherwise not debilitating. Eg Alzheimer's starting decades ago by being forgetful. I have no idea which one the post is reffering to.
    • findthewords 1y ago
      Thankfully biology has redundancy, so a single cosmic bit flip does not send humans into a BSOD.
      • tsoukase 1y ago
        In biomed sciences we rarely refer to the huge amount of resiliency of living organisms. They are so robust, stable and self healing that it would need a fleet of human made machines to cover the basic difficulties.
  • tasty_freeze 1y ago
    I am a 61 year old guy. I've never been overweight, never smoked, I've never been drunk and drink only infrequently, and have been fitter than average ... sometimes very fit. A few years ago I decided to make an undirected kidney donation. I thought I'd be a slam dunk. Everything was great, except my eGFR (estimate granular filtration rate) was 73, and for many people it is more like 110, which disqualified me, as after donating my number would get cut in half, putting me at some risk. So I pulled up blood work results going back 15 years that I had records for and found that 73 was my high score! It typically was mid 60s, with a low of 61. I have no idea why it is so low. Anyway, this is the reason I'm relating this story. It seems odd that my kidney function has gone up. It wasn't just a fluke -- I've had bloodwork done at least five times since then and I'm always in the mid 70s now.
    • flyinglizard 1y ago
      I previously looked at eGFR numbers and they seem very ballpark-ish and prone to fluctuation, as their name implies. My understanding is that they are used to detect acute cases, rather than to give a real measurement of your kidneys if you’re well.
    • coldtea 1y ago
      Maybe you lost weight or changed some aspects of your diet after 50?
    • gniv 1y ago
      Your diet is less salty maybe?
    • Aurornis 1y ago
      eGFR is an indirect measurement of kidney function. It can be slightly lower in some people with normal kidney function for various reasons. There are additional kidney function tests that would be used for a more complete picture of kidney function if it was suspected that you had a kidney condition. There are more direct GFR tests, minus the ‘e’ prefix which means estimated. However, a better blood test that is more accessible would be Cystatin C. Worth getting one of those as a baseline at some point. In the content of donation, though, it’s not worth risking it. It’s best to play it safe. If you happened to have been inspired by the kidney donation story and blog that circulated in rationalist communities, it’s also worth noting that it was not a great source of information about the relative risks of the procedure, despite being presented as comprehensive and well researched.
  • manmal 1y ago
    It would be interesting what this functional reserve is, right? The microbiome perhaps, or intracellular minerals? Some other thing we haven’t even identified?
    • chithanh 1y ago
      In case of kidneys, my understanding is that only a certain subset of glomerular cells are actively filtrating blood at any given point. The other cells form the functional reserve, and start to become active once the other cells age out, or are disrupted due to an event (like poisoning, such as mycotoxin damage from eating moldy food). Once the functional reserve is exhausted however, no new cells can become active and you are left with whatever dwindling GFR you have, until you get a transplant. With the vascular system you have example arterial elasticity which is an important measure of vascular health. When your blood vessels become less elastic it does not immediately cause symptoms, but it increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. This is also why periodontitis and gum disease is a predictor for vascular diseases: Bacteria enter the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa and form plaques along the blood vessels.
      • findthewords 1y ago
        >"This is also why periodontitis and gum disease is a predictor for vascular diseases: Bacteria enter the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa and form plaques along the blood vessels." And yet in the year 2025 dental care is globally treated as seperate from other healthcare, a strange historical artifact that clings on.
        • bongodongobob 1y ago
          Story from the US: had an awful tooth infection (from a known dead tooth) that I tried to ride out, half my face was swollen up, even my eye looked half shut. Well after a day of this I couldn't take the pain. Called my doctor "we don't pull teeth, you have to call a dentist." So I called a dozen dentist and was told either "we aren't taking new patients" or "we can't get you in for 6 months". I ended up just driving to a dentist and saying "look at my fucking face! Pull this fucking tooth out!" Finally a dentist was able to spare 30 seconds to yank it. Bill was something like $750. The US is a dystopian hellhole.
• kulu2002 1y ago
  Great study
• alganet 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • tgv 1y ago
    The "between-the-ears" brigade is at it again. Just asking questions.
    • alganet 1y ago
      The very fact that you are hypothesizing about my intentions is, in fact, an act of asking questions on its own. You are worried that I might be suggesting some form of conspiracy, but these worries are all in your head. There is uncertainty about the effects post acquiring a covid flu. If there weren't, the article wouldn't mention the efforts in trying to figure out what these symptoms and causes are. I'm sure they are also "asking questions". Instead of criticizing me, perhaps you could try to put your guard down and try to investigate if other more reputable sources asked the same questions as I did: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=psychological%20effects%20covid https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=psyc... I haven't read those papers, and I'm not qualified to discuss them in depth. However, they indicate that my assessment of the situation is not as outlandish as you suggest.
      • tgv 1y ago
        > You are worried that I might be suggesting some form of conspiracy, but these worries are all in your head. Because you communicate them. Combining unrelated information without any reasoning, backup, or even a link is a bizarre style. You go from wars, AI and lack of information about long covid to ignoring all physical markers. And that doesn't take away that you argue in the same style as the people who argue that illnesses can be overcome mentally. Cancer originates between your ears; if you get it, it's your fault. Suggesting long covid is the same, places you square in that group. > Instead of criticizing me, perhaps you could try to put your guard down and try to investigate if other more reputable sources asked the same questions as I did: Fortunately, I am qualified for psych research, and if you would just open them, you'd see that those papers do not suggest a psychological cause for long covid. People are anxious, health staff is under pressure, those with long covid need psychological support, because it's hard to cope with, there's neurological damage, and there's some speculation about long-term effects on the population. There are obviously way too many papers to even scan. You also did a wrong search, because "effects" are not what you're suggesting.
• findthewords 1y ago
  Preventative treatment for disease is ten, hundred, thousand times cheaper than treatment ex post facto.
  • fxtentacle 1y ago
    Only if you have an excellent health insurance plan. Otherwise, preventive treatment costs you money, while curative treatment is paid for you. Sounds like a misguided incentive ...
    • nmstoker 1y ago
      I think you may be missing the point: preventative treatment is typically much less expensive, for instance behaviour and dietary changes do not require drugs at all and avoiding some conditions can be helped by drugs which have long since come off patents. But even with your point, all insurance companies I've ever had cover with in the UK have had some element of support for preventing illness (periodic assessments, support material and trackers) and, at least with people covered under company schemes, they clearly have an incentive to offer more if you are at risk of becoming affected by a preventable illness.
    • DarmokJalad1701 1y ago
      My insurance covers annual bloodwork/physicals as well as immunizations. I am pretty sure most health insurance policies do.
      • Aurornis 1y ago
        The ACA made this standard. It’s been like this for a long time. When we were hiring a lot of people out of college, I spent way more time than I expected teaching them about how healthcare works and how to find their own information. We found that a lot of them would build their idea about how health insurance works from years of reading Reddit posts: They thought visiting the doctor was always going to be a $1000 bill or a single accident was going to medically bankrupt them, because those are the stories they saw on Reddit. I would explain things like the free annual physical and many just wouldn’t believe me. It’s really tough to cut through the confusion out there.
• chiefalchemist 1y ago
  It’s interesting they make no mention of trying to understand the body’s ability to self-defend and self-heal. That is, it’s possible to get X (e.g., cancer) and the immune system wins the fight (before it’s even detected). In theory it’s possible the best early treatment is no treatment at all; that there might be such a thing as too-early detection.
  • Jolter 1y ago
    This is a well known phenomenon in medicine. It is always carefully considered when making public health decisions regarding e.g. screening programs and intervention best practices. For example, a PSA test is useful to detect cancer of the prostate, if a male patient has urination problems. But doing general screening for high PSA values in middle aged men is not considered a good idea, because there are too many false positives and it would likely lead to many unnecessary invasive interventions.
    • Earw0rm 1y ago
      It's also why "early detection leads to longer survival" claims in cancer patients has to be treated with quite some care. Two people develop a fatal cancer at T0. One is diagnosed at T1, the other at T2, both die at T3. It looks like the first person survived longer with cancer than the second, but they didn't: the interventions had no effect, it's just a statistical artifact. This is by no means always the case - earlier detected cancer is more treatable - but it still needs to be controlled for.
      • chiefalchemist 1y ago
        And of course there’s always a riff on the placebo effect even when the intervention isn’t sugar pills. That is, success gets attributed to the approved intervention, but at the nuts & bolts level it had little or no effect. The body cured itself but the treatment gets the credit.
    • jajko 1y ago
      Have a friend working as urology surgeon - basically all men get prostate cancer, its just a function of time (unless you die young). Most of them is benign, or cause few issues and are often let alone. If you would run scans on all males above say 45 there would be endless stream of operations happening, all of which would lower quality of life for everybody, and sometimes shorten their lives a bit or a bit more. Any public healthcare system would be brought to the edge of collapse by just this since surgeries are supremely expensive everywhere, that's not just US invention.
• fuckyah 1y ago
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• allthedatas 1y ago
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  • allthedatas 1y ago
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    • fitsumbelay 1y ago
      Personally, I don't find it helpful to post paywalled content here, at least without a summary. Other than that I'm here to for the kind of nerdy tech stuff that normally doesn't appear on NYT, Bloomberg etc which are designed to service adtech more than illuminate its consumers. I do consume their content, especially the latter but to me posting that stuff here feels like coming to a small downtown art gallery to discuss a prime time tv show like Big Brother or Friends reruns
• paul_h 1y ago
  Dr Sean Mullen on Twitter "there are now over 500,000 studies on the consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection" - https://x.com/drseanmullen/status/1924960793264525772 https://x.com/drseanmullen/status/1924960793264525772 *IF* that's true - yeesh!
  • nradov 1y ago
    Number of studies are meaningless by itself, and an intellectually rigorous scientist wouldn't use that as a metric. We've known for decades that any serious infection can have long lasting effects for some patients. There's nothing special about SARS-CoV-2.
    • jassyr 1y ago
      you can't criticize someone for poor reasoning while simultaneously making unsupported claims yourself
      • nradov 1y ago
        What's unsupported? What I stated is common knowledge in the medical community. Anyone unaware of this hasn't been paying attention for the past 40 years.
        • s1artibartfast 1y ago
          I suppose the no special sauce is the unsupported claim, not that I disagree
          • pas 1y ago
            usually (at least since Ol' Russel) there's no real need to prove that space is quite rare when it comes to teapots so far there was absolutely no scientifically "woah" thing about SARS-CoV-2, it fits "neatly" into an acute respiratory virus hole (we know of a lot of coronaviruses and influenzaviruses), we even had a lab set up to research zoonotic viruses ... instead of telling idiots to stop running the patient zero lottery on that fucking market.
• thebigspacefuck 1y ago
  If you’re looking for the archive link in the comments like I was, it’s at the top underneath the original link.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• briandoll 1y ago
  And yet not a single doctor in the United States will permit you to care about early signals, preventative medicine, or routine deep dive bloodwork, in order to stave off those diseases. Anyone who's on top of this is paying fully out of pocket for individual tests, screenings, medicines. Manageable for some, unattainable for most.
  • nradov 1y ago
    Huh? Plenty of doctors out there cater to the "worried well" and will order any blood work you want or spend a lot of time with you on preventive care. But of course most health insurance plans won't pay for that. In most cases it's a total waste and doesn't significantly improve patient outcomes.
  • datpuz 1y ago
    My ex girlfriend was a doctor and we talked about this once. The gist of it that I got was that excessive early tests have a lot of risk factors that come along with them, because tests themselves being harmful (CT scans cause something like 5% of all cancers), and because false positives lead to unnecessary treatments, surgeries, medications, etc which can cause real harm. Basically, if the expected harm from the proactive testing is greater than the expected harm it would mitigate, you don't do it.
    • rkangel 1y ago
      I had not heard the "CT scans cause 5% of cancers [in the US]" stat before, it makes for interesting reading. That's incredibly high!