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stephengillie

Previously on HN:.

- Alzheimer's caused by dirty air. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230932

- Alzheimer's caused by lack of sleep.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228627

There's mounting evidence that "health news" is neither healthy nor news.

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if lack of sleep and dirty air both compromise immune system function, it would be consistent with the virus hypothesis.

You forgot:

- Alhiemers is a form of diabetes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4578267

It's caused by brain damage, the sources of which are many.

Brain cell deterioration is a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, i.e. it brain damage is the effect of the disease, not the cause. What causes that deterioration is up for debate. Finding that cause is integral for better treatment and hopefully prevention and a cure.

At the risk of being a cynic, patterns to date necessitate I ask:

- Who paid for this research / article.

- Is this cause, or simply correlation of a fair common virus?

The article is written by a member of a team that publishes a lot of articles advancing this hypothesis - heck, that’s exactly what this article is about. I’m not qualified to judge the claims on-merit, but the self-serving nature of this article sets off my skepti-sense, and the fact this “major” revelation doesn’t come first-published in a notable journal is the strongest hint the research (while still useful) is probably vastly overstated.

Makes it hard to judge, but there are occasions where peers refuse to believe something right up until everyone accepts it, like the cause of ulcers often being Helicobacter pylori. Peer reviewed research these days isn't always dependable either given the for pay nature of many journals. Findings with actual anti-virals changing the brain function of people with Alzheimers would go a long way to showing the connection. That there is an inheritable connection to the disease is fairly well understood so that so that would make it more likely to get the disease wouldn't be much of a shock.

The story of what causes ulcers is truly crazy. Sounds like something from decades ago. Hard to believe we were that stubborn.

And that is a full field of hard working individuals. I'm almost scared to think what my own biases are. I wish there was a solid framework to approach them, since I think most are basically invisible to the holder.

Well knowing they exist (and affect intelligent, thoughtful people, too) is surely half the battle.

I guess Charlie Munger wrote about the kind of thing you're looking for in 'Psychology of Human Misjudgement'.

But then I heard him interviewed on Chinese TV recently, and he seemed to be displaying some huge misunderstandings on human genetics and intelligence, and making what I consider basic reasoning errors. Perhaps he didn't feel like applying his knowledge of cognitive biases to this area.

I think the glib answer is that that is science. It is the best we have at making sure we don't stay stuck on biases. It is just frustrating, because it would be nice for the answer to be immune from the thing it protects us from.

That is, I would much prefer if science was immune to bias. Evidence is quite clear that nothing is free of bias, though.

MIT & Harvard, NCBI says Research Support, US Gov't, P.H.S. (I believe that stands for public health services, based on googling US Gov't PHS). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/221933

Since I can't read the paper, I'm not sure. I hesitant to generalize, but if dementia can be broadly defined as global, regional, or nuclei-specific cell death. Then a good rule of thumb is anything that impacts the homeostatic equilibria of the CNS in a negative manner, will eventually lead to dementia. Which would account for why there seems to be a plethora of causes.

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