A possible link between childhood trauma and Alzheimer disease

Scientists have a hard time figuring out the cause, maybe because the slow vague onset of the disease?

When I first had my symptoms which made diadnosis possible I already had a couple of demyelinated lesions. Did they show up the days before? Or years ago? Who knows.

You cannot do daily mri scans of a large enough population to catch even 1 patient at exactly the beginning of their disease, and even if you catch it, how can you gather useful information non-invasively?

Anyways, I try reading scientific papers, and avoid the overhyped “eat this to cure your MS” type articles.

They are so confident in everything, but of the 100 of real studies I’ve looked at, almost none of them had any surefire way to slow disease progression, some of the findings even contradict popular belief.

For example eating whole grains, drinking wine in moderation and drinking coffe may have a small positive effect, instead of cutting out all gluten.

Or it might just be a currelation in a way that wine drinkers have a higher socioeconomical status, which they tried correcting for, but they missed some unknown factor anyway?

Just try doing the regular healthy lifestyle; good food, some moderate excercise, no stress.. Because you can still get all the other lifestyle diseases ontop of MS as anyone else, and as we are more vulnerable we need to be more careful.

The reason this is possible is because the most physiologically potent aspects of the limbic system develop well before the prefrontal and other more modern structures can completely solidify. Because these structures are grow slower and are more elaborate, the homeostasis necessary for their stable growth is much more delicate.

There are likely periods of chemical vulnerability during development that can act as transformation pathways of the entire development of the advanced structures. They will continue to express their growth/maturation genes and develop in some way but it leads to a completely different operational configuration and also one that relies heavily on conceptual and even chemical aspects of the external environment for internal conceptual and chemical stability.

The one of the main functions of limbic system is the main component in the fear/flight/fright mechanism. This system exists because its operation of generating chaotic action and bias of reaction has in some way granted its host a significant increased statistical advantage toward surviving and reproducing whereas, although it can make a big difference, the more advanced structures have not adapted the capability of continued existence as a species on its own.

Natural selection favors whatever social genetic traits confer an increased rate of survival of an organism to reproductive maturity and then what personally governing traits lead the individual to reproduce. It is fair to presume that all traits of the human mind developed completely for only two purposes, to reproduce and to behave in ways that ensure your offsprings survival which unintentionally contributes to widespread survival advantage of humans outside ones family, increasing the chances that there will be similar individuals to confer a symmetrical advantage in return. Pretty much a cloud of increased likelihood for the species as a whole in that area to survive. Pretty much everything we think is important in society can be traced down the bias in the limbic systems chaos system

So in both cases, they do the opposite of what I claimed people commonly stoop to today:

(a) presenting lesser, irrelevant issues and "slights" as "traumas"

(b) focusing on how traumatised they were by those (that is, playing the victim, not taking pride in overcoming them or at least pretending to be a tough survivor like the four Yorkshiremen).

The violence of it stunned me. And the worst violence, is that everyone is fine with what women do to men at breakup - when the same people would be up in arms if a male were a “pervert narcissist” telling truths in a vexating way, while they don’t mind that my girlfriend asked me to move to another country only to dump me there without notice, without remotely thinking that I would be homeless for 3 days and it was winter, and would be too disoriented to recover abroad or to choose to come back. I know, expecting people who say “I love you” to mildly care for you after breakup is a childish expectation. I… I didn’t know. I had been fed popular songs usually saying “We broke up but I wish you the best”. I didn’t know someone who loved me could suddenly make me homeless because I wasn’t pleasing her in bed anymore. This is violent. And society is fine with that, and people don’t tell that normal girls might do that, while they warn all the time about pervert narcisssists.

For 15 years I oscillated between good person, gay, misogynist, or worse, and cut ties with 98% of my friends and all my family. But clearly, my mental model of people’s interactions is a swamp: I both understand nothing of why people are unnecessarily mean gratuitously, and both understand very clearly that we are pieces of meat. I could now strangle kittens without any feeling right now, and yet I don’t do that and still donate to charities, because I try to believe in a world of decent people. Which the world clearly is not. My mental model is a swamp, this is correct.

Sorry for going out of topic.

The woman aspect I can't answer, every psychology can be different, some will never love with pity, some may only love with pity (I for instance, have a mental block on loving someone just because of fun times.. as if it's not enough somehow)

For whatever it is worth, the normalization of abuse is one of negative aspects that keeps influencing people long after. Kids that were abused can grow to think it is normal which then leads to them directly into abusive relationships as adults.

> I'd question if a woman can ever really be attracted to man they pity or a man who has been sexually abused, for example.

Why? This seem more related to gender roles or blaming yourself for abuse. Or you think that being sexually abused transforms men? Or it is purely about womens lack of capacity to be into someone vulnerable?

I believe that the way we as a society currently respond to things like abuse often results in way more trauma and victimhood than what victims would experience without that reaction. Needless to say, abuse is unacceptable and deserves punishment. However, I think we would end up with less suffering in the world if we’d become more reserved in deciding what qualifies as abuse, especially when it comes to (otherwise consensual) sex. Morality is subject to fashion after all.

I’m of the opinion that an act is not abusive if it’s not experienced as such, on the condition that the people involved in the act are aware of the possible consequences of it.

In your case, both at the time and up until recently, you didn’t experience the events as abusive but as actually positive. Like you said, the teacher was kind and comforting. What you learnt about him later doesn’t change that fact, and it doesn’t have to reduce him to an abuser.

To put things in perspective: in Ancient Greece, pederast relationships were completely accepted; strongly encouraged even! There’s no evidence that these relationships, a cultural tradition in a highly developed civilization, were experienced as abusive. They were also about love, education, and doing activities together, so it seems like your teacher would fit the definition of an erastês. It’s very possible that he wasn’t evil, just a man looking for love and intimacy in the wrong era/culture.

What I assume has given you trauma is the mere potentiality of sexual abuse, at a time you were suffering actual physical abuse. From what I can gather it didn’t end up actually happening, so there’s no telling whether he wanted more from you, and if he did, whether he would have acted in a way that felt abusive to you at the time (coercion/threatening).

Maybe I’m too open-minded by today’s Western moral standards, but when it comes to youth-adult relationships, I don’t think we should equate sex to abuse. It’s suffering we want to prevent, and suffering is the result of abuse. If you look at it like that, what you experienced and now view as grooming could actually be seen as a way of avoiding abuse.

You might disagree with my definition of abuse and argue that it would’ve been abusive in any case, but again, given the information you provided this is how I would personally look at it in this situation. I hope these different perspectives can help at all.

Also, please kindly point out any biases in the article if you can.