Hacker News Reader

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

So after decades of research, and thousands of different markers they could have looked at, they found that pH is a significant marker?

View on HN

That the pH is lower has apparently been known for a while. What's not been clear is the cause of the lower pH and whether the low pH is causing the disorders or if it's just a side effect of an underlying cause or of the medications. This still isn't clear. It could even be a combination of factors, with low pH caused by lactate production stimulating the disorder which increases lactate production... etc.

IMO one aspect that isn't well understood enough, and not given enough emphasis in research, are the "cleaning" cycles of the brain. In particular, neuronal autophagy, but also cleaning cycles during sleep. If the overall PH is off, something isn't being cleaned correctly. A byproduct isn't being removed.

I'd love to know how a ten day water fast affects the mental processing and bio-markers of a group of schizophrenia patients. I'd also love to compare their brain activity in a sleep study to that of a control group.

Parallel issues here as with most dementias. Plaques seem to form in all brains, but for most people there are cleaning cycles that break them apart and remove them. With Alzheimer's disease this stops happening. Why?

Another intriguing question for schizophrenia -- eating foods rich in glutamate, for instance rich cheeses, is a negative trigger for many people with schizophrenia. Why? Well, glutamate is metabolized in the brain and it's used as a neurotransmitter. Obviously there is some sort of chemical processing issue in some patients. Figure out what exactly what the issue is and I'd bet you'll know much more about the root cause of Schizophrenia, and potentially several other major mental disorders.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25236722

"Glutamate plays key roles linking carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism via the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, as well as in nitrogen trafficking and ammonia homeostasis in brain."

"Ammonia homeostasis," sounds like something that might affect PH, right?

As I understand it the Broad Institute discovered that these 'cleaning' cycles are unchecked and essentially overclocked in schizophrenics

Weird thing with glutamate though, is that schizphrenics show lowered activation of glutamate which is supposed to be responsible for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Things that increase glutamatergic activity(like cycline) help this.

I think it's a form of bias involving negative feedback loops - since we see mostly patients with symptoms already showing, we see glutamate at the end of the process working to acidize already acidic environment i.e. against the gradient.

Ten day water fast sounds like a great way to die of a starvation-induced heart attack.

What is the significance behind ten days of starvation? Why not 1 or 2 or 3? 10 sounds 100% arbitrary.

Not sure what's new 5 years after https://now.uiowa.edu/2012/05/acid-brain (same researcher, pretty much the same conclusions).

Isn't increasing carbon dioxide in the air a standard stress invoking procedure in lab tests on rodents etc?

Hard to analyze lots of brains of dead schizoids until we had a methodology to diagnose, permission to analyze them, and then looked closely enough.

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v9/n7/full/4001511a.html?fo...

Sometimes lots of theories come out of a minute variation correlation and sometimes it's just a sampling coincidence (like it's just how schizoid brains break down). I'm VERY sure, someone has altered a schizoid's diet to a more or less acidic diet before. I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective, but it might lead to some other discovery.

I've never heard someone refer to a schizophrenic as "a schizoid". Schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder are distinct disorders with different symptoms.

not in the field, but I think it's both somewhat slang for schizophrenia (see also woody allen movies), also somewhat antiquated or at least highly specific term from (iirc freudian) psychopathology

>I will bet that pH therapy won't be very effective, but it might lead to some other discovery.

just a note on what therapeutic impact pH therapy have in other situation - mice study on pH therapy (baking soda added to drinking water) for cancer shows at least 2 things - neutralizing tumor pH improves response to other therapies and when alone the pH therapy reduces and slows down metastases formation (at the level of chemotherapy drugs - check out the 2 times difference in survival at the end of 4 month experiment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2834485/figure/... ).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com