Loss of myelin is one of the major factors of age-related brain deterioration

I would also avoid them because: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7678175/

> Compared to a potent eukaryotic DNA topoisomerase type II poison ... ciprofloxacin produced comparable dose-dependent SCE frequency increases.

Translated: Compared to a chemotherapy drug designed to cause DNA breaks to prevent cell replication, ciprofloxacin produced similar "sister chromatid exchange" counts, which happen when damaged DNA strands need to pull in duplicate material from "sister" strands.

Counting SCEs is also used to measure human DNA mutations from things like carcinogens and radiation.

Because the side effects are considered better than dying? None of them are drugs of first resort for bacterial infection.

We shouldn't. You probably don't want to take a quinolone antibiotic unless all other options have failed and your life is at risk. There are decades of reports of permanent, severe nerve damage after as little as a single dose. At one point the FDA even had to step in to force some unusually severe language in warning labels.

But doctors can be a stubborn bunch, and many still prescribe it way too liberally.

The side effects aren't well known / understood. They also happen to less than 1% of people who take the drugs (at least that's the current estimate, some side effects may not be properly linked to the drugs). There's very little research on how to measure the damage done by fluoroquinolones. Once a patient says they have tingling, the drugs have already caused permanent damage, and a doctor isn't going to know what to measure to assess this damage, nor what they should have been measuring to prevent the side effect in the first place. This lack of understanding may lead to an inflated sense of safety profile.

They're used to treat antibiotic resistant infections in "hard to reach" places, since the fluorine moiety allows them to penetrate most places in the body (which is also likely related to how they cause insidious damage). This power+reach makes them a default drug for some doctors to treat infections.

In my experience as a pharmacist, it wasn't first line, but sometimes it's second line. For UTI, respiratory tract infections, and skin and soft tissue infections. Pretty common actually.

Benefit/Risk ratio.

There is often no "perfect" ligand because benefits somewhere cause harm somewhere else since evolution reused so many substrates, or the means of regulation similarly ups or down regulates anti-target activities.

Furthermore, compounds that will work are often constrained by many factors.

Because antibiotics are often used to treat infections that left to their own devices could kill you.

Because the benefits of antibiotics vastly outweigh the risks. You're better off taking antibiotics than getting a serious infection.

They should be used rationally though. Ciprofloxacin and other antibiotics in the same class are stronger medications compared to penicilins for example. The ideal situation is to figure out what the bacteria is sensitive to with a culture and antibiogram and then choose the weakest, most specific antibiotic out of that list. Of course, this requires time and resources which may not be available. In some cases, it's been proven that waiting for test results leads to worse patient outcomes so doctors will prescribe antibiotics empirically and adjust treatment later.

Another reason is that an entire course of Cipro is like five days. It was pretty much the only antibiotic my university health center prescribed while I was there and I knew many people who took it (early 2000s, USA) because getting university students to stick with a longer regimen was very difficult.

If you tell a doctor that you had a bad reaction in the past, he or she will check a data sheet and assume you're insane or exaggerating.

There's some corruption going on in the data, perhaps? There are so many anecdotes from this class of drug, they cease to become 'just anecdotal.'

You're told to by someone you trust.

if you have myopia, or high IOP I wouldn't look into Cipro for blame.

Everything is a poison to some extent.

Antibiotics are poison to bacteria.

The difference here is that you're not a bacteria and can safely metabolize the drug itself.

Chocolate is poison to dogs. Not to humans.

One course of an antibiotic isn't going to rot your brain or nerves... and even then, chronic use isn't a problem but for a small percentage of people who do experience these adverse reactions.

I had similar treatment after nasal polyps and didn't notice anything.

What was the surgery like by the way? it sounds painful.

CBD sublingually and exercise.

I have something wrong with my HPA axis resulting in Cushing's syndrome that causes extreme anxiety, high hr & bp persistently. It's usually an adenoma or hypertrophy on a pituitary or adrenal, or metabolic syndrome.

I have a similar story, with an antibiotic that is also an immunosuppressant (I was taking it for that effect). After taking it for just 2 weeks, I had terrible pain in my arms and legs. My doctor suggested I keep taking it for a couple of weeks more, to see if it went away. It got worse, and I stopped it a week or so later. I understand this is a very rare side effect, so rare I don't think it was even mentioned in the leaflet - I'm just incredibly unlucky to have such a reaction.

I was left with small fiber neuropathy (nerve damage) in my arms and legs, and with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) too. This means I'm in constant, unending pain (which takes a huge mental toll), that I'm tired all the time, and if I do any more than the gentlest of exercise, I fall asleep and am more tired and in even more pain for days or even weeks afterwards. It's fucking horrible.

This was about 6 years ago, and I'm pretty sure it's permanent. I haven't quite given up hope though - I have several Google Scholar alerts setup, and read several papers every week, in the hope of finding something that might reverse things even a bit.

Sorry to hear your story. I can sympathize as you see from my post above.

There was a book, Bitter Pills, by a journalist who's wife had years long neurological side effects from a flouroquinolone, iirc. It's an investigation into the world of drug testing, prescribing, and side effects. https://www.amazon.com/Bitter-Pills-Inside-Hazardous-World/d...

> The doctors were completely dismissive of and uninterested in the symptoms

I had exactly the same issue! GPs ran a few tests and couldn't figure it out. They labelled is as fibromyalgia, even though I didn't fit the criteria. I pushed to see a neurologist, who ran a few tests and couldn't figure it out - he also labelled it as fibromyalgia, even though when I questioned it he admitted he knew almost nothing about it!

There was a lot of back and forth, with GPs and neurologists being really dismissive. I forget how long this went on for, but a couple of years at least.

So I did my own research over a long period of time. I found only a handful of other cases, but with the symptoms I came to the conclusion that I must have small fibre neuropathy. I pushed the neurologist, who grudgingly did a nerve biopsy, which confirmed small fiber neuropathy. He stopped being dismissive after that.

For pain, I ended up with a similar situation. I tried gabapentin, pregbalin and all the usual things like topical capsicain, TCAs, SNRIs, diazepam, opioids etc. They either didn't help, couldn't be tolerated, or caused more problems. Within the public healthcare systems, the list was eventually exhausted, and they weren't interested in trying anything else. They didn't believe how bad the pain was, and were unwilling in any case to go beyond their list of standard treatments. In the end, I paid to see a private pain specialist, and eventually found ketamine to be really helpful - not just with the pain, but my mental ability to live with it.

in my own experience (with my wife's chronic condition), most doctors are extremely dismissive if they don't have the answer off-hand. I don't know why this is - but reactions ranged from saying she was lying or was addicted to painkillers (despite not asking for painkillers) to switching back and forth between two common diagnoses even though they were quite clearly inaccurate. I have no faith in the front-line medical system to be able to deal with anything less blatant than a broken bone or a flu, if only due to what appears to be doctors' near-universal refusal to respond to uncertainty with humility and curiosity.

> The doctors were completely dismissive of and uninterested in the symptoms -- it really shook my faith in medical practice.

I had a similar experience as a child, where a textbook case of a reasonably common disease went undiagnosed for 2 years by doctors before a toll booth worker at an airport diagnosed me. She recognized the symptoms because her dog had it. Sure enough, after my mother brow-beat a doctor into running the absurdly simple blood test she was proven right.

On the one hand, I want to chalk this up to them being like everyone else: 90% of them are just shit at their jobs. On the other hand, I have it on good authority from nearly every nurse I've ever met that doctors are indeed arrogant, dismissive, and often mistaken.

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your significant other.

I developed permanent neuropathy and muscle problems in my lower legs after a course of Levaquin for a respiratory infection. Constant fasciculations, cramping, and pain.

It sounds like you've done your research on potential treatments, however in case you're unaware, I've found considerable relief by soaking my lower legs daily in an Epsom salt bath. I can attest to the fact that magnesium sulfate is without question topically permeable. It may be something for your wife to consider, to see if it helps her.

Frankly, at this point it's pretty clear that the entire healthcare system in the US is parasitical: doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and pharma companies. Their purpose is to extract value, not restore health.

I have a very low opinion of doctors, who are by and large arrogant and of middling intelligence, a dangerous combination when a person's health is at stake.

>The doctors were completely dismissive of and uninterested in the symptoms -- it really shook my faith in medical practice.

This and similar comments here, and my own experience make me realize how elitism can be dangerous. We blame social media and propaganda for mistrust jn science (and rightfully we should criticize those) but part of the mistrust is a problem of medicine's own making. What happened to self-doubt?

I've been wondering if vitamin technology has been keeping up.

for example, I read there is more than one form of vitamin E and just supplementing one might not work as expected.

Terry Wahls, the doctor who claims she reversed her MS through diet would only partly agree. In her book 'The Wahls Protocol', she spells a diet regime out from a functional medicine perspective.

This is, in my experience, insufficient.

Some people don't absorb b12 via digestion so have to inject it instead

To be fair, the OP wondered if he was missing out on some nutrient. That was the reason for scurvy in the past, limited diet of a ship, lack of vitamin C.

I doubt that this is true. In the era of colletion and hunting, the diversity of food is based on the near-by ecosystem, which is larger than modern supermarket.

Look up "paleolithic ketogenic" diet, a clinic in Hungary is treating "incurable" disease with an all-meat high fat diet. With extraordinary success.

Humans were obviously hunters for most of our evolutionary history, deriving most of our calories from animal fat.

Not sure about variety effect, but overall they had much healthier diet from certain perspective (fruits + vegetables + lean muscles/whatever part of animal). No processed sugars, preservatives and other slow-poison crap. I don't think the diet was complete and for sure some vitamins/nutrients were often missing (ie in winter).

Combine it with much higher activity and they would look like superman with regard to fitness to average human these days. At least those who survived those harsh conditions, infancy and various easy-to-cure-now ails like tooth infection or appendicitis.

Increasing omega3 was a major one for me, definitely decreased chronic inflammation. The problem occurs if one's omega6:omega3 ratio is off, and most westerner's diets are very high in predominantly omega6 fatty acids[0] (such as olive oil, and most other oils). Though if you choose to supplement omega3, make sure it is controlled for mercury-contaminants.

With fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamin D, be vary of vitamin toxicity (Hypervitaminosis[1]), as they accumulate in the body. But you'd probably have to take a huge amount over a long time to get there.

Another interesting supplement might be L-Carnitine[2], especially if you eat little/no meat.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12442909/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis

[2] https://examine.com/supplements/l-carnitine/#effect-matrix

It’s not obvious why you think food diversity is related to diabetes risk in the modern age.

That's the entire state of bio-medicine; nothing is known for sure and everything is too complicated to understand. And all treatments are based on general statistics. I can't wait for this stage to end.

University press release. The real science is too technical and boring, so the press release states the background of the research as the breakthrough, or makes wild unsupported speculative claims about applications, or both.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_matter

The new research is in identifying a gene.

The word "discover" is a bit of a stretch here, but I suspect they mean that the "discovery" was that the loss of myelin is a part of age-related cognitive decline as well as MS.

But MS is not the only disease is in which demyelination occurs, not by a long shot. Even the definition of MS (when it comes to getting a diagnosis) is a lot more complex than just "degeneration of myelin".

Just scanning the paper and there are other major limitations that didn’t make it into the summary. They don’t control for other activities that screens may substitute for such as active physical play, having books read to them, active exercise, etc all of which may be positively associated with white matter integrity, or may require a certain threshold of activity which isn’t being met for kids who spend too much time watching tv so there’s no time to do other helpful activities. Other studies show negative associations are much more strongly correlated at the high end of exposure, suggesting that substitution for other beneficial activities could be a bigger issue than the exposure itself.

It also controls for family income and age but not cognitive scores prior to screen exposure. It could also be that kids starting with “less integrated” brains find more active tasks less engaging and end up watching more screens as a result.

I don’t let my toddler spend much time on screens aside from FaceTime and the odd episode of Tik Tak[1] while we’re cutting her nails. These studies’ data are often presented as simplistic linear regressions suggesting that like lead, there is no safe exposure to screens, when it’s just as likely that a small exposure that doesn’t get in the way of a lot of other activities is helpful and helps kids feel comfortable and less confused in our modern screen-filled world.

Anyway, I just needed to get that off my chest because I see too many families get overly stressed and paranoid by the AAP guidelines which are speculative at best.

[1] Your toddler’s favourite Belgian animation show. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_yPvRyfdJlw

Very interesting. The standard caveat regarding mouse-human equivalence, but once again it seems that exercise is good for neurological fitness.

I like Rhonda Patrick, but a lot of her recommendations seem to be speculation on what should work, given what she understands about a subject and relating it to a new study. Not that it's not valuable, but it's the sort of thing Reddit would class as "science" rather than realising it is a hypothesis that needs testing.

Was about to write this.

Here's also an easy summary of it's effect and recommendation If one consider buying supplements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MushroomSupplements/comments/h090ry...

Bought some myself and tried to track its effect by playing 3DS Devilish Brain Training game and track performance.

How do you know if you're getting the actual mushroom vs. the substrate?

They say similar things about psilocybin and magic mushrooms, but some people still eat the mycelium to get the effects. I guess it's more economical to just grow mycelium.

I have small fiber neuropathy, with de-mylinated peripheral nerves. I tried lion's mane (amongst many other things), but it didn't help.

I'd made sure t get one that was comprised only of the fruiting bodies, with a tested percentage of polysaccharides.

I tried taking this for a while, but found that I started having really bad headaches. I was taking a well known brand from Amazon. I couldn't be 100% sure the headaches were due to the Lion's mane, but felt better after I stopped taking it.

I was pretty bummed, I was hoping for a little boost from this as I had read good things about it, including the NIH articles you posted.

I can also confirm, finding the supplements that are not just mostly the ground brown rice flour is also a little difficult.

Are there any concerns about the active NGF compounds being 5a-reductase inhibitors?

The problem is conceptually quite simple: Ageing is an accumulation of degradations in our DNAs. We just need to reset/monkey patch our DNAs with a prior younger version through CRIPSR + viral vectors. The only issue is the scale of the gene therapy (changing whole organs) but I'm quite sure it is doable, just underresearched/underfunded.

1 March – Scientists use lipid nanoparticles to deliver CRISPR genome editing into the livers of mice, resulting in a 57% reduction of cholesterol levels.[160]

Rejuvenation is not science fiction, it just require funding but expecting this from humanity might be considered science fiction and the situation isn't going to improve given than the Flynn effect is reversing..

See also those related thoughts I wrote years ago: https://github.com/LifeIsStrange/An-algorithm-for-curing-age...

Tai chi, if you still can.

Helps substantially with balance, which should give you some more time on your own feet.

I recently saw a video of Paul Stamets talking about mushrooms and how they increase connections in the brain. I think I remember hearing the term myelination thrown in there somewhere. Granted I don't know enough about him to say that hes a credible source.

But, it would be a good place to start (research). Its a shame that the science community seems to steer clear of certain topics entirely.

That cloth insulation often included asbestos fibres.