Peer review does not mean fraudulent studies can't go through, it is not even meant for that. Reasonable review does not excludes these.
There seems more evidence that allergies are on the rise. Maybe. I note that I found a lot of articles saying things like "autoimmune conditions are a Western disease" and blaming modern lifestyle. But arthritis is as old as the hills.
I'm not at all denying that they are actually on the rise, but nothing really seems to tackle this in a way that answers all the questions - is it on the rise or do we just detect and categorise it now. Does it occur because people live longer? In the past did people have these conditions and not know, have to live with it or die? I know that for my back condition people in the past got it and their back bones fused together over time, nowadays people tend to get treated with anti-inflammatories and now biologicals plus exercise regimes to prevent it. As there is a wide range of intensity within each autoimmune disorder the majority of people who had a condition in the past might be unreported.
So if anyone can point to articles or papers that address all those things I'd be very interested.
Who funds this and that research?
You will find that pharnaceuticals in their desire to show growing market opportunities to their backers, and grow, will make very well sure to fund enough groups so that some of them come up with the conclusion: these issues are on the rise and don't appear to relate to environnemental exposures, even adding that treatments are or will be made available to diagnosed patients.
You will then find another paper, likely funded by an NGO working on reducing the use of pesticides, or other surely health impacting industrial habits, that there is undeniable correlation between the intensive use of chemicals in agro and the rise of auto-immune disease, with a lag of X years, whatever make the numbers look legit.
I'm not qualifying scientific research in general as biased towards the backers' incentives, but there is a lot of noise in statistical discoveries, scientists mostly interested in publishing something since that's their financial prerogatives to stay in the game.
With all that being said, I will give my "opinion" which may answer part of your questions, but my conclusion wasn't reached by the standard of scientific methods:
- we are ingesting and getting exposed to a wider range and higher quantities of toxic compounds, often so synthetic. - the immune system is a complex machine, that tilts and can overreact when on alerts, tends to have good memories, and can trigger or retrigger oversensitiveness, all for our survival's sake, it isn't de facto a disease to have the immune system take the wrong fights. - that immune system, shown to not always discriminate properly, probably having evolved to be rather safe than sorry. - we don't fully understand the immune system, maybe we barely do.
Is it possible that we diagnose as a disease what might simply be the expected consequences of long term exposures to undersirable chemicals? That pharma got to sell something so they don't have any problem marketing chemical therapies and strongly promoting that rather than suggesting addressing the causes might be a better option?
It wouldn't be the first time in history that physicians insist with the known treatments for symptoms they ignored the causes.
Again take this with a pinch of salt, i am not advising against drug treatments altogether but took the opportunity to remind this thread that health care is also a business.
From a non medical scientist who happen to have allergies and skimmed through a few hundred papers on the subject.
That is the marker of a bad question. The way to solve it is to move into more actionable questions.
All issues are rising, the whole 'we are just smarter now' is hubris, we really are not.
Overall, all our tech looks at helping us not have to change, grow, or adapt. We want to live a life of comfort but comfort means no pressure and no pressure means no adaptation reinforcement of advantageous mutations, since what is most advantageous is being average in every way.
i wonder how this carries over to mental stuff. like autists or psychopaths might have gotten forced out of society a few hundred years ago so they couldn't reproduce as much, might explain why the former is so much more common? idk
The food we eat, the drugs we get, the lifestyles we have, the air we breath- are all different and make us different people than prehistoric humans.
For better and for worse.
I also expect to see hormonal birth control become less effective over many generations. Those for which birth control fails are likely to have more children.
Of course, all of us here will be long dead before any exploration pressure exerted by those drugs becomes apparent at a population level.
Most people _not_ dying of fentanyl overdoses are not taking them in the first place, rather than surviving exposures due to sturdier nervous systems. I think a normal interpretation of the phrase "opioid resistance" would mean that their systems can tolerate a higher dosage.
Conversely, most birth control failures are thought to be behavioral differences. I.e. whether the user is aware that protection may be absent due to missed doses or other scenarios called out in the instructions.
Maybe these two forces will cancel out since one selects for more discipline and the other for less...
Forgetting to take pills is already part of the measured effectiveness of hormonal birth control. It's included in the official statistics.
As it should be, obviously. Not taking pills is the easiest and most important way to resist their effects.
I rather hear from more and more people, how they have to struggle reproduce at all.
Absolutely not. As long as they're in use, the pressure is there to make them less effective.
Having <1% of population die before breeding because of some factor (no matter if drug overdoses or something else) is not a sufficiently big pressure to nudge towards an opioid resistance in just a few generations; if there today were some meaningful sub-population with such a resistance, an effect so tiny as the current overdose deaths might result in that resistance spreading over hundreds or thousands of generations; it would take a few more orders of magnitude more overdose deaths to have an effect in just a few generations. Similarly for hormonal birth control, especially if it fails, it has an above-average likelihood of being aborted.
I mean, all these things can happen, but not after we're dead, but at the time scale of year 3000+ by which time I'd expect that medical technology would allow us to control these genes directly, making the direction of natural selection irrelevant.
The number of people with a disease can stay static, but the number of diagnoses can increase dramatically with widespread screening and accurate tests.
With funding secure you can now roll out more research studies that tell practitioners all about the disease and how it’s “increasingly important”. Now doctors will test more patients for the disease, maybe over diagnose it too. And so and so forth.
Humans are flawed. Humans make research. We should be more skeptical about supposedly “established” science.
I want to buy that car brand because it has so many recalls.
Every system has bugs, and recalls means you're fixing them. Which to me is much better than hiding them.
The government specifically works with industry to allow corporations to get away with saving a buck at the expense of the wider public, while the wider public is given a medications and bandaids downstream that decades later turn out to be scams: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Like when the government allows Coca Cola and Snapple bottling companies to switch to metric tons of non-biodegradeable plastic, while individuals are told they can’t have a plastic straw or bag, and can save the world by recycling plastic (a scam by the plastic industry to distract from the upstream problem, nearly all of the “recycling” consisted of shipping to China).
Or how factory farms are now causing more negative externalities, which we are now finding out last month:
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/apr/25/use-of-antib...
https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/why-ar...
I invite you to consider the same dynamic with autoimmune diseases and others. It’s the same question of whether kids always had this level of gender dysphoria and ADHD and autism, or did something happen in the environment, or did the industry start to overdiagnose them?
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but activists on either side insist on their explanation being the dominant one, or perhaps the only one. Similarly to how other activists might insist on systemic sexism or racism to explain a gender pay gap, or systemic antisemitism to explain criticism of Israel, etc. (Disclaimer: I’m a Jewish straight cis male.)
This is an impulse by people with a specific agenda / issue to make sure their agenda “wins”. In every case, there are real problems that need to be solved upstream, but the focus by well-meaning activists is only on downstream solutions (eg prescribing amphetamines to ADHD-diagnosed kids) rather than upstream solutions (eg shortrr school days and allowing kids to climb trees like in Finland, where ADHD has far less diagnosed). They will spend decades advocating the same thing and expect a different result — it’s not collective insanity, it is actually learned helplessness.
It is common to think this way when one’s “tribe” is involved. To illustrate it, I will touch on an issue with dynamics that have affected many people on HN. I hope it’s alright to mention it, because that is the only way you’ll see that the “downstream focus” even concerns many sacred cows.
So — to hit home, this even happened on HN with depression. I have seen it for years, where any attempts to attribute some diagnosed depression to upstream causes like diet and exercise and environental factors are met with “you just don’t understand, clinical depression is completely different, and you should be quiet”.
In each of these issues, the science shows that the theory that promotes medical interventions downstream is often wrong, eg in 2022 we found this out when it comes to the theory of chemical imbalance / low serotonin explaining depression:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/20/scientists-q...
On the other hand there is a ton of studies on everyone from young girls to middle aged people getting far more sad and depressed:
Teen girls: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/teen-girls-sadness...
20% of all middle-aged women is on antidepressants (surely it can’t all be explained by a chemical imbalance, right?) https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/cdc-states-1-in-5-women...
Opioid epidemic in men, once again much of it is due to capitalism, both from an employment and a pharma industry side: https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/epidemic.html
But it’s easy for society to just prescribe medications to people rather than fixing systemic issues, eg implementing a UBI or 20 hour workweek overtime protections so people can spend more time with their family. In capitalism we’d rather allow companies to social problems with surveillance capitalism, social networks and AI to optimize clicks, because that’s what the market demands.
On the other hand there are tons of studies and books on how the market and new technology has led to the breakdown of American social and family life. Starting with “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam back in the early aughts. People in big cities don’t even know their own neighbors. They live alone with their cats, order in netflix and uber eats, they stick their kids in public schools and parents in nursing homes, but hey, the economy is good right?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-hea...
Anyway to end with autoimmune diseases… notice how much more effort it would take for our society to stop producing plastics in clothes, that break down into microplastics on every wash, aren’t caught in drains and now find themselves everywhere, humans accumulate more and more microplastics. Rather than confront these environmental issues head-on (as we did once with CFCs and Toronto Protocol, the one big win for solving collective action problems) we allow the microplastics to accumulate in all biological beings, including us, throw up our hands and wonder aloud what could be causing autoimmune diseases? Meanwhile it is more convenient to open a new plastic spoon from a plastic package shipped from china, than wash a metal one. Instead of refilling bottles like our ancestors, we buy new ones every day and chuck them in the “recycling” LOL. Oh, and polyester is just so stretchy and convenient, as is teflon non-stick coating on our pans, why demand our government tell the industry to phase out nonbiodegradeable stuff and research biodegradeable alternstives? Nah that’s too hard to do as a society. So the problems get worse every year and “activists” arise who attribute it to a systemic issue like sexism or racism — they think they’re a great ally but rather than fighting each other we should band together to demand our govenrnment aggressively tax negative externalities upstream with Pigouvian taxes.
Fiscal policy btw would be a great way to remove stimulus and UBI money from the economy. Certainly much nore targeted and better than crude monetary level the Fed has, raising interest rates on everyone. But our politicians are scared to raise taxes on industries, or go up against Big Ag or Big Pharma. So we as a society allow Day Zero to occur in cities, antibiotic resistant bacteria to grow, etc. all because of regulatory capture and cowardice. It will continue unless people recognize that the real problems are upstream, stop fighting each other and clearly spell out how we can organize to demand our government raise taxes on industries externalizing costs to others. If there was ever a proper role for government, it is that!
PS: with AI, experts say 10% chance that humanity is wiped out… yet we can’t stop the competition and progress, and certainly when people are affected we’ll have industries to help them out downstream. Just another example, perhaps may be the biggest and fastest one soon.