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Comment by thereticent | Hacker News Reader

Individual differences in neuronal and glial cell metabolism and excretion, and presumably toxic effects from those changes and associated inflammation.

I just got funded as PI to study blood proteomics and long term cognitive outcomes after large vessel stroke, with a focus on early identification of post-stroke dementia. It's a very cool area to be in.

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What an awesome space to be working in. I have a lot of appreciation for people working on addressing unknown areas of human health and well-being. Always makes what I’m working on feel insignificant in comparison.

As someone having a blog on neurodegenerative diseases (and someone in their 60s), thank you for working in this area.

Congrats! That sounds amazing! Thank you for doing this important work.

What are your thoughts and the general consensus within your field for how individuals might prevent dementia?

Are there untested, but plausible hypotheses for the causal mechanisms -- perhaps chronic inflammation, liver or metabolic disease, bad gut microbiota, a multitude of factors? Or does more data need to be gathered?

A hypothesis is also linked to metabolic psychiatry (having diabetes, mental illnesses like depression/paychosis), diabetes, insulin resistance in the brain.

As someone who has had a (brain stem) stroke, and also as someone with close family members that have/had dementia, thank you for your work.

I've always been curious about this. Can you briefly summarize how you take peripheral blood and fractionate it out to these small bits. What's the deal exactly? Is it like centrifuged and the plasma pulled out and everything is solution there or it's in the buffy coat or down deeper? Where are these proteins found exactly and how are they purified?

sounds like this one would have been a great read https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3280421/

Good overviews here https://comis.med.uvm.edu/vic/coursefiles/MD540/MD540-Protei...

and https://www.promega.com/resources/guides/protein-analysis/pr...

I always thought proteins were too big for some of these techniques but apparently not.

Amazing

Thank you for your work

Aside from good sleep are there any evidence based practices for mitigating these risks?

Kinda hard for evidence based. Maybe look into low carb diets. There are small studies for increase life quality and cognition (I do it).

Any hints in the literature as to whether these protein imbalances are downstream of some other cause that is itself harmful, or harmful in themselves? (I.e. direction of causative arrow)

Thank you for your efforts. It's unsung heroes like you and all the other researchers behind the scenes that improve the lives of countless individuals.

Do you use neuroimaging as one of your outcome measures? I'm curious as a neuroimaging scientist.

Also: Congrats on the funding!

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