Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin's Search for a Parkinson's Cure (2010)

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31 pointsvalhalla22 comments

Science can devise solutions to problems like Parkinson's, eventually. The article discusses a few items in the current search-- a good start.

If you want better results than an amorphous "someday", you're not gonna get it with our society's current level of engagement with science. Science isn't lucrative, and the public doesn't care about anything other than the usually overstated "breakthrough" headlines.

You want diseases to be cured? Make science a priority rather than something extraneous. Get the children and the public excited about science again, then try to steal smart and qualified people from other disciplines with outstanding benefits and hard problems. Make sure there's enough patience and funding (in that order!) to really delve into things.

The work of Dr Bredesen deserves more than some negative rumbling. Dr Bredesen comes with a treatment that has a solid basis: do everything possible that is anti-inflammatory. And he reversed (that is the technical term for 'cured') severe memory loss and the patients that were unable to work, were able again to work after a few months of treatment. That is most certainly a breakthrough since before the work of Dr Bredesen there were only medicines that could slow down the disease.

As a scientist I'm interested in his results, but highly skeptical. Let's see someone else replicate them.

Genetically I have a 50% chance of getting Parkinsons. My father was diagnosed earlier this year, and 2 of his 4 siblings already have it. There's a medical study being done on our family to try and identify the gene responsible, but we already know my cousins and I have a 50% chance. I'm not sure I'd even want to know whether it's 100% if they were able to do the tests. Not until there's a possible cure for it. Knowing won't change anything if I can't do anything about it. I guess I'm still in denial, trying to just ignore it away for now.

I just hope there's a cure by the time my children (6 and 3 now) get to my age, otherwise I'll advise them to think hard about having children and passing on the gene.

Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm in a similar situation, did you have kids hoping that there would be a cure by now? Or were you not aware of the 50% chance when you had them?

The average age for Parkinson symptoms is 60 years old. In the year 2070 I would hope we will have an effective treatment.

Also, 60 years of life is well worth it.

You can easily live 10 or 20 years after you get it. I think Michael J Fox and Andy Grove have had it for almost 20 years.

I didn't know at that stage. I don't know if it would have influenced me to not have children.

To Sergey Brin and all others that fear for Parkinson: only if you forget what others told you and look at the work of Dr Dale Bredesen, you can open your eyes for new ways to cure brain diseases.

In a recent presentation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzCXyjy3BRo Dr Perlmutter and Dr Bredesen talk about a real cure for Alzheimer and hint that they think that they can do the same for Parkinson.

More info at http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html (9 out of 10 patients cured!) and http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/

"Nine of the 10 displayed subjective or objective improvement in cognition beginning within 3-6 months, with the one failure being a patient with very late stage AD."

The way this sentence (from the abstract) hedges by including "subjective OR objective" hardly makes this sound like a "real cure". As the summary notes, "These anecdotal results suggest the need for a controlled clinical trial of the therapeutic program."

Notwithstanding the cautious phrasing of the author, 9 of 10 patients had such huge improvements, from not being able to work and forgetting everything, to the opposite, that I take the liberty of calling that a 'cure'.

A sample size of 10 is hardly something to base any meaningful conclusions on.

9/10 cured? Not even close. If you know anybody with Alzheimer and Parkisons you'll know that while exercise can help, it's not remotely a cure for these devastating diseases.

Yes, very close! The wrong idea about medicine is that an illness should be cured by one medicine. But what if a patients has 3 problems? Or 5? Then with the current 'science' one will never find a cure since this science will look only for cures that contain one single medicine. Dr Dale Bredesen is vary courageous to deviate from this path and to make a treatment plan with 30+ variables. And why argue with that if the results are amazing?

Great article, in my opinion it sums up the immense possibilities of data usage in modern research. Coming from a health science background I quite often get frustrated from how long it takes for a scientific paper to go from hypothesis to publication. I believe that the use of our immense computational power to process through large amounts of data will continue changing the traditional approach to research. Once we figure out how to reliably tackle the inevitable bias of these data sets traditional data collection will become a topic in statistics history.

Thank you for posting this. I don't have any personal connection to Sergey. But I'd be damn heartbroken to see such a titan of our time be captured by this miserable, disgusting disease.

Andy Grove and Michael J Fox suffer from Parkinson's. I've donated here before:

https://www.michaeljfox.org

Uh, Sergey only has the LRRK2 mutation and has not been diagnosed with Parkinson's. Yes, this raises his risk, but let's not jump to conclusions. Details:

Only about 10 percent of Parkinson’s disease cases so far have been linked to a genetic cause. Mutations in the LRRK2 gene are the most common cause of Parkinson’s disease in this relatively small group, representing one to two percent of total Parkinson's cases.

However, for people of two particular ethnic backgrounds — Ashkenazi Jewish and North African Arab Berbers — mutations in LRRK2 account for a much greater number of Parkinson’s disease cases than in the general population. While estimates vary, it is believed that changes in LRRK2 (predominantly the mutation scientists know as G2019S) account for 15 to 20 percent of Parkinson’s disease cases in Ashkenazi Jews and about 40 percent of cases in North African Arab Berbers. Other genetic changes in LRRK2 that increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease have been found in additional populations, such as in Asians of Chinese descent. It remains an active area of investigation to find all the genetic changes in LRRK2 that may lead to Parkinson’s disease.

https://www.michaeljfox.org/understanding-parkinsons/living-...

Methylene blue had some good research behind it. It's not the high tech cutting edge billion dollar drug made possible by big data and artificial intlligence that everyone is dreaming of, so it will probably be ignored no matter how much academic research piles up on it.

It also has the intolerable side effect of making one's pee blue.

It also has the intolerable side effect of making one's pee blue.

Doesn't seem that intolerable to me, as far as negatives go.

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