Alzheimer’s enigma: Why is incidence falling 16% a decade in richest countries?
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The spike in anxiety and depression in the past decades makes me wonder if there is something going on there or if it is more of a reaction the social environment.
https://www.amazon.com/Estrogeneration-Estrogenics-Making-Si...
Pretty much 90% of plastics.
He says early pregnancy failures have increased ten percent. The graph he links shows no such increase according to line of best fit. It only shows it if he cherry picks the largest observation in the data.
Even if I grant this false assumption, his inference that late miscarriages have declined doesn't even follow, the data he's presented is fully consistent with an increase in late miscarriage of a few percent.
Regarding the testosterone question. The data in the tweet you mention actually does show such a decline - of almost 50 percent in young US males. His point is that the decline has stopped and levels have increased by an extremely small amount in the last 10 years, although that could easily be statistical noise since it is such a tiny increase. Overall, his data shows a large decrease over 50-100 years in the US.
Plastics might not be the only factor, I believe a lot of it has to do with lifestyle of average americans as well (obesity, sedentary, high sugar and fat diets) though I do think that plastics play a part as well.
We know all about it. It's just no one cares.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4544973/
That said, cancer is apparently everywhere these days so that's a possibility, but no links are yet known. Though I do steer towards steel and iron anyway since I like to get a good sear which is easier with iron, and using metal tools is just more fun.
At that point your nonstick pan releases toxic fumes, and starts to deteriorate.
PTFE is banned here, after research showed correlation with cancer.
With "normal use" there would be 0 car incidents, 0 plane crashes, 0 shootings.
The chemical companies claim that what they replaced it with is safer alternatives, but after reading this article I seriously wouldn’t trust them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...
People like us should get together and fill the world with at least sensors so that it becomes more visible.
Highly recommend anyone interested in medicine to study toxicology, because there are so many misconceptions and FUD in this space. It's a great bullshit detector for all the hippies crowing about "removing toxins from the body"
One of such is the Minamata convention on Mercury [1].
"Studies also confirmed that neurotoxic metals, including lead, mercury, aluminum, and manganese, are measurably more harmful in combination than separately" [2]
One researcher that has been advocating for the link between mercury toxicity and Alzheimer's is Dr. Boyd Haley [3].
Lastly, here is a cool video showing how Mercury causes neuron degeneration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpC17nfZVvU
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_Convention_on_Mercury
[2] DOI:10.1588/medver.2005.02.00070 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AQxkIcXrt0 [4]
Long term(as in multiple decades) we might want to switch maglev railways, as there is no friction to stir particles in the air from that. That would also remove the need for batteries whose production is probably harmful to some degree.
Infrastructure costs are gonna be fun though...
For completeness EV apply regenerative braking for a large proportion of use, which is for all practical purposes particle free. Obviously tire wear still applies but brake pad wear is largely reduced
So with EV you are getting rid of ICE particulates, CO2, CO, and NO2 (particularly on Diesel engines) and also drastically reducing brake particulate from brake pad wear.
And to be fair my intuition is that the health impacts of CO and NO2 is likely far more harmful then tire and brake pad particulates.
Having said all of that we would still be better off just having everyone using electric buses or trains within Metro areas at least.
It seems some people is working on that too:
"The Tyre Collective designed a simple device that collects microplastics as they fly off a car tire. As the group of designers explains it, their device helps on the path toward zero emissions by using electrostatic and airflow around the tire to capture the microplastics and other small particles that are shed over the lifetime of a tire."
https://www.ecowatch.com/microplastics-car-tires-james-dyson...
That's hilarious.
I'd be willing to place a bet there are 101 reasons why that sort of contraption will never be seen on the roads.
Its one of those things that looks great on a designer's CAD, and perhaps "works" in a carefully controlled lab simulation. Regrettably its quite obvious its not going to work once you throw good old real life at it.
If the system is broken, the only economically sensible way to fix the problems is to change the system. Fundamentally.
(In this case, the "broken system" refers to the idea that when we go to work, we have to bring two resting chairs, a couch, and a large coffer. And all of society should be shaped around this daily furniture transportation. Tire dirt is just the second of a very long list of problems caused by this idea.)
This is the problem for most of us right here.
Is there a major environmental/health problem with particulate from regular steel-on-steel railways? I would guess the iron particles don't travel very far due to their density and will mostly turn to harmless iron oxide.
Yes, as only extremely modern passenger trains have regenerative or resistive electrical brakes and even they need to do the last few bits of the braking process with the old friction brakes since electrical braking doesn't need at low speed.
Old trains, especially freight, still runs entirely on friction brakes - either metal or the new "silent brakes" that are a plastics composite.
Additionally, you have environmental concerns from oil and lube, which is why you should never fucking ever re-use torn out wooden railway sleepers. They are drenched in immensely toxic anti-rotting agents to begin with, and seep up all the oil and other contaminants (e.g. feces from bypassing old trains without closed-loop toilets).
The anti-rot agents (and, in case your local railway does pesticide spraying to reduce weeds, these too) will leech out into your flower bed and kill it off.
You still want friction breaks to hold you in place once you've stopped, but there's no strict need to use them earlier. Yes, current controllers may not be intelligent enough, but that should be fixeable without changing the power electronics, and only replacing their controller.
Europe still uses screw and hook/buffers for that reason, and it took well over a decade to mandate silent composite brakes.
Even the older non-inverter locos here use electro-dynamic brakes (afaik for economic/control reasons, as they are better than air for keeping speed during downhill sections under control), and the remaining ones will retire soon.
The screw and hook/buffers issue is more due to the distributed ownership of the freight cars, and early issues with certification of adapters between UIC central couplers and screw+hook/buffers.
Sure, there are situations where it's too steep to only brake the loco, but they aren't that common and adding some induction brakes to some of the heavier cars and preferentially using them shouldn't be particularly expensive. Sure, not cheap, but also not prohibitive for getting rid of friction breaks in the course of normal operation (well, some friction breaking may be needed from time to time to keep them in check and verify proper function.... but still a >90% reduction shouldn't be hard.
In tunnels, from "erosion from the wheels and brakes, and the rails", yes:
When we send them to poorer countries, as Germany has been doing with cars that fail the TÜV emissions test. Central Asia is full of German cars.
I suspect that the same is going on with recycling and emissions. Rich countries reduce their impact by moving it elsewhere.
It's likely to get smaller with time though, because e.g. diesel cars manufactured during and after the VW emissions scandal turn out to be expensive to repair once key components like injectors fail.
There's a whole market of refurbished injectors, flywheels etc., but buying such parts comes with a risk.
Also VAG products declined in quality in the recent years.
Anecdata: my father's 2018 Skoda CitiGo failed its emissions test because of a failed EGR valve - turns out it's a common problem - even in fairly new cars.
> A commission organized by medical journal The Lancet last year calculated that modifying a dozen risk factors could prevent or delay dementia in 40% of cases. These 12 variables are lack of education, hypertension, auditive disability, smoking, obesity, depression, lack of physical activity, diabetes, social isolation, excess consumption of alcohol, blows to the head and atmospheric contamination.
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention...
Regardless, based on your description, the current elderly are the people who grew up drinking heavily.
"ResMed was established in 1989 by Peter Farrell in Australia."
Apnea treatments have improved big time since then, and will keep improving, as most are misdiagnosed.
Could also be the shift towards digital encoding of cell phone calls versus the old analogue?
At the very least, it passes the sniff test for plausibility and it is worth looking into.
Richer countries have been trying very hard to reduce smoking since about 1990.
I keep reading so much about the mis-folded proteins that it's easy to forget that's not the target?
But at the same time, I can't help but think that if we stop the mis-folding we stop the problem? Or am I just thinking about it all wrong?
It's more like "believing the death was caused by loss of blood" though, right? As in, it's not completely unreasonable to believe that if you could somehow stop (& compensate) the loss of blood in a timely manner, the person might live, even with a bullet in their body.
I'm a fan of the theory that bacteria/viruses are a cause and that the proteins we see are an overkill immune response to that (wouldn't be the first time - influenza/covid kill some not directly but via the immune system over-doing it).
See https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4 for more details.
That would be ... bad ... given that we just had a lot of the world exposed to Covid, and then we just vaccinated everyone to ramp up the immune system.
But when the grant money is coming in, you're gonna push your hypothesis hard.
That said, IMO we really don't know. I worked on figuring out how to make these experiments more reproducible. My paper is cited a TON, but whenever I peek into the field, people are still are using shitty techniques, even the papers citing me.... Feels like "you didn't read the paper, did you?".
But the maintenance workers (mitochondria) have a much more active life than the sedentary (brain) cells they inhabit and have suffered through many cell divisions each with their accumulation of errors till at some point just like all us worker drones, have no fscks left to give.
There were serious gains in IQ between the cohort aging into Alzheimer’s 30 years ago and today. This was mainly due to improvements in childhood nutrition, healthcare, and education in the post war period.
It’s well known that Alzheimer’s rates tend to be much lower in the high IQ. Not because the incidence of disease is lower, but because it’s harder to diagnose. John von Neumann would have to experience some serious mental decline before he started failing the standard cognitive batteries.
This is less hopeful for two reasons. Number one the disease still exists and is having an effect. It’s still bad if you experience mental decline even if you start at a high baseline. And if life extends far enough, eventually it will get you in a real bad way sooner or later. Number two IQ gains, like height, started seriously after this cohort. So we wouldn’t expect to see continued declines at the same rate.
While it's seems true that "High IQ can mask early Alzheimer’s symptoms"[1] I would be surprised if that could explain such a large decline in incidence as they mention in that report that while it did mask the early symptoms, that just made the decline appear more sudden.
The cognitive decline is really incredible, I saw it happen to my grandmother and she went from being a perfectly normal person to not recognising family members and becoming increasingly confused and aggressive all within a few years.
So I think even more educated/intelligent people would eventually be diagnosed (perhaps a few months later) and thus any effect on the incidence would be small (due perhaps to these people dying prior to diagnosis).
Furthermore, the Flynn effect is quite small, no - around 14 IQ points over more than half a century and now some talk of a decline, the "reversed Flynn effect" so it's not even clear how substantial an IQ difference we could expect.
If the decline is due to "improvements in childhood nutrition, healthcare, and education" then I think that's quite good though, as those are things we can control.
[1] https://www.heraldnet.com/news/high-iq-can-mask-early-alzhei...
Even controlling for these improvements, the Flynn Effect is still happening. The cause of the Flynn Effect is as-yet unknown, but it is not due to these improvements.
There's speculation that it's due to society increasingly being an environment that develops abstract thinking, which is the kind of thinking that is tested in IQ tests. So it's not that people are organically developing a higher IQ, but that people are just getting better at IQ tests
Interesting
That’d mean you have a reliable biomarker. But as I read comments here it seems that protein buildup may be unrelated.
Do the populations of richer countries consume less sugar per head than poorer nations?
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/agr_outlook-2015-tab...
https://www.newsweek.com/dementia-gum-disease-alzheimers-lin...
DNA tests on three brains with Alzheimer's disease and six healthy brains also had the gene associated with P. gingivalis in their tissue. The team also examined the cerebrospinal fluid and saliva of 10 patients believed to have Alzheimer's disease, and found the P. gingivalis gene hmuY in seven, and P. gingivalis itself in all of them.
And in an experiment on mice, those dosed with gingipains had higher levels of the hallmark Alzheimer's protein, amyloid beta, and greater damage to their neurons than those who didn't. What's more, when mice were treated with a drug blocking the enzymes, the neurodegeneration stopped.
...
However, he said the study was limited because the team has not yet determined if different strains of P. gingivalis are more virulent than others in causing brain infection. "This remains an area of active investigation," he said.It's been approved, ... for what, then?
Is this true? Diabetes, obesity, anxiety, and depression continue to to climb
Cardiovascular health has been improved because of CO2 emissions.
Or, if not playing the blame everything on climate change game - Less smoking, less PM 2.5 pollution, better climate control in buildings have all also helped cardiovascular health.
(Missing from the article - declining incidence is more pronounced among men than women)
Smoking and medicine.
People seemed to think smoking was lung cancer, when it was always about cardiovascular health. (It was also about smoke not tobacco)
Poorer countries climbing, a lot due to other diseases lowering.
You'd need to really drill down to find where to link it to Alzheimers, assuming this best guess from the researchers is correct. It seems a very good guess, it fits in a few places.
Assumptions 1) Alzheimers has been postulated to be a metabolic disease of the brain and the keto diet via ketones provide a cleaner-fuel with less by-products.
2) The richer countries has more people able to afford the keto-food. Generally more expensive. Fatty beef cuts, cheese, salmon etc.
Just a stab in the dark or another guess. I'm not a scientist !