4 ms·
Your pet issue has little or nothing to do with Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's results from a combination of three things: 1. Amyloid plaques forming between brain c
by ggreer 12y ago
Your pet issue has little or nothing to do with Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's results from a combination of three things:
1. Amyloid plaques forming between brain cells.
2. Neurofibrillary tangles forming in brain cells.
3. Loss of brain cells, likely from the build-up of 1 & 2.
All three of these things happen to everyone as we age. This is true no matter how good your immune system or diet is. Many of us just get killed by something else before it becomes pathological.
- kolev 12y agoAgain, you're going symptomatic about the disease... The premise that we live longer than ever before and that's why we get these diseases is a statistical error. Child mortality and poor record-keeping was driving life expectancy down. My own homeland had a lot more centenarians in the past than in the past decades, for example. My own predecessors lived longer than my relatives who died recently of various chronic diseases.
- djokkataja 12y agoIt's not a statistical error. Overall, the maximum age that anyone gets to is not much higher than before, but: 1. Many more people reach old age than previously (due to reduced infant mortality), so old age diseases are a larger problem for society since a larger portion of society is getting old. (not citing a source for this because it's extremely well established) 2. Life expectancy for various ages (not just starting at birth) has increased steadily over the last 100 years. Check out page 3 here: http://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/Docs/DEIP_Gallop.pdf http://www.osfi-bsif.gc.ca/Eng/Docs/DEIP_Gallop.pdf Life expectancy improvements at various ages over the past 100 years: At birth: +27 years At age 15: +14 years At age 45: +10 years At age 65: +5 years At age 80: +2 years Functional medicine is not responsible for the increases in life expectancy.
- kolev 12y agoAs you can tell by your own sample, above 50, the improvements are more like a rounding error than anything. Considering that most of these "improved" lives are actually suffering from various chronic diseases, I don't think there's any improvement. It doesn't really matter if one lived 80 or 82 years, the quality of life of those 80 years is what matters and given how much time is invested now in healthcare compared to zero to nothing in the past, that is really non-productive, no fun, i.e. wasted time, so, subtract that from the overall lifespan and there's no improvement at all and on the contrary!
- gwern 12y ago> Overall, the maximum age that anyone gets to is not much higher than before Not-so-fun fact: ever since Jeanne Calment died in 1997, the maximum age (as recorded by the GRG) has kept falling: while Calment hit 122, we're now down to 116 or so, which is much more impressive than it looks because the annual mortality rate for supercentenarians is like 50%+. I've wondered more than once if she was some kind of unique freak of nature - she was even a smoker!
- kolev 12y agoA good example is the Sardinians whose lifestyle is in the base of the Mediterranean Diet. They are actually getting pretty sick recently from autoimmune diseases and one of the leading hypotheses is the eradication of malaria, which has kept their immune response overactive before that.
- sliverstorm 12y agoOr now they aren't dying from malaria so now they die of something else?
- kolev 12y agoThey've had remarkable life expectancy with the malaria as well. I'm sure everybody would prefer dying from malaria than MS, getting blind or an amputee from diabetes, and so on. Improvements in life expectancy today is not an improvement of overall health, just the medicine found ways to keep sicker people alive for longer (i.e. countering natural selection). If infectious diseases like tuberculosis and others were eradicated just a couple of centuries earlier, modern medicine today wouldn't be so proud of the accomplishments in life expectancy! Unfortunately, due to widespread abuse, antibiotics are no longer the panacea that they used to be!