Scientists discover a new hormone that can build strong bones in mice
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Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.
But once cancer has occurred, adding more testosterone doesn't matter because the sponge is already super-saturated.
In fact, doctors who have this perspective will permit men with prostate cancer to continue testosterone therapy.
Of course there are many types of cancer so this may not be true for all prostate cancers.
What is the biological mechanism behind this statement?
Cortisol is also released during strength training, though.
Seems like a real issue is low impact cardio, which isn't negative for bone density (as far as I can tell) but does have a theoretical opportunity cost when you could be doing weight-bearing cardio, which does improve bone density.
Agreed with littlestymaar's comment higher up, though, that exercise rates being what they are, the theoretical opportunity cost may be quite theoretical.
more than compensated for by the compressive loading signals from lifting heavy.
Would that also be true for caffeine consumption? IIRC it increases cortisol levels, but I don't really know much about what else it does, I've only read the Wikipedia page and gone "Wow, I'm really glad I've already cut back".
What you said about caffeine worried me somewhat, so I looked it up on Wiki and what I found about it was mostly innocuous and some properties are even beneficial, it's even on WHO's list of essential medicines.
Many vegetables have much more dangerous compounds and toxins: oxalic acid (a rust remover and bleach that can rot your kidneys) in rhubarb and Popeye's spinach and many other green-leaf vegies, solanine in potatoes, and very dangerous cancer-causing aflatoxins in peanut butter, and that's just the beginning, there are many dozens more! Now you know, are you going to starve?
And to boot, caffeine is a nice looking heterocyclic purine-like molecule with a six and a five-member ring both heavily laden with nitrogen, so what's the worry about? What's not to like about it?
"""Consumption of 1–1.5 grams […] per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism.[141] Caffeinism usually combines caffeine dependency with a wide range of unpleasant symptoms including nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations after caffeine use."""
"""cases of very high caffeine intake (e.g. > 5 g) may result in caffeine intoxication with symptoms including mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, disinhibition, delusions, hallucinations or psychosis, and rhabdomyolysis."""
>5g. Now, who do you know consumes more than 50 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest none.
If you scaled up oxalic acid daily doses in the same ratio as for the caffeine example then in the first instance the person would almost undoubtedly have kidney stones. In the second example the person would be dead. Right, at that dose Popeye's spinach meal would almost certainly have killed him.
At least the 'caffeinated' person, whilst off his head, would likely be still alive.
Even water has a LD50 rating. As millions attest, caffeine is one of the safer less harmful chemicals that plants use to defend themselves with. Almost every other organic molecule that plants use to ward off insects is more toxic.
Here's a few we actually eat: www.mashed.com/1299947/most-dangerous-vegetables/ There are tens of thousands of others that you'd want to keep well away from, Nux vomica, Manchineel, Death caps, Atropa belladonna, etc. By comparison, in the danger stakes, caffeine doesn't even get off the starting block.
Me in 2009, by dose, as a result of constantly increasing my consumption and ending up at multiple tablespoons (not teaspoons) of instant per cup and nothing else but coffee as daily fluid intake.
Hence being glad I'd already cut back by the time I'd read about the impact of too much.
They warned us in school about the dangers of tobacco and alcohol (and all the illegal drugs*), but nobody ever said "there is such a thing as too much caffeine".
There is, and the unlimited free coffee in most workplaces turns out to be a problem for me.
* regarding your point about LD50 water, school also lied about the dangers of Ecstasy. Leah Betts' actual cause of death was water overdose, but she was the literal poster-child for the anti-drugs campaign in my time.
In the wash-up I reckon our views are likely closer to each other than it first seems. I agree completely with you being indignant about being lied to at school.
The whole matter of drug education I reckon is in an unholy mess. However, it's difficult to blame anyone in particular because there are so many factors involved and almost every one of them is complicated by multiple factors. I don't envy anyone involved in setting policy in this area.
There are social and moral issues involved not to mention that both schools and parents often have little factual knowledge about drugs, drug taking, addiction, and likely most have no personal experience of drugs having never taken them, etc. This itself is a major problem.
Thus, often the information they impart to kids comes more from emotion than from actual fact. This often misleading information is also the source of why there are so many views and why it's so difficult to reach a common agreement or consensus.
No doubt both teachers and parents want to keep their kids safe, so they'll tell kids what they think is necessary whether it's correct or not, and they'll do so without due consideration or whether it's prudent to even raise certain matters.
Therefore, it's sort of understandable that teachers, schools and parents lie to kids about such matters. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that lying to kids doesn't pay off as in the long-term it has negative consequences (and I'd reckon that's especially so when it comes to information about drugs).
In my opinion, misinforming kids is a serious matter for whatever reason.
My views and opinions about this go back a long way and owe their origins to an incident that happened when I was very young. (Fortunately it wasn't about drugs because there weren't† any around when I was growing up decades ago, we kids were very lucky in that regard.)
The incident occurred before I'd started school when my mother took me to see a matinee and during the newsreel there was a news clip about cancer and cancer research. Later when I asked her about it, so as not to worry me she told me that cancer was a very rare disease and that I'd never have to worry about it. She also failed to tell me that one of her sisters died of cancer before I was born. So a woman who would have been my aunt died of the disease. Now that's damn close to home I reckon.
It all unraveled a couple of years later when I was about 7 or 8 when I was on holidays at my grandmother's place. Her next-door neighbor was dying of lung cancer and it was my grandmother who told me so—not my mother. That's when I found out my mother had lied to me. I never mentioned to my mother what my grandmother had told me—and I've never forgotten that I was lied to.
We adults almost always underestimate how intelligent kids really are and the moment they get a whiff that they've been hoodwinked is the moment when mistrust first sets in. In my opinion that's really bad, especially so early on because the earlier things are imprinted into kid's minds the harder they are to shift later.
Back to the matter of your sensitivity to caffeine, these issues arose again in another current story that you may be interested in under HN title A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee (it's not the actual story title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067616.
I've made several posts here but the one that's probably the most relevant to you is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076191
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† Thus, we had no instruction about drugs at school except to be told that if we were caught smoking we'd be in trouble (especially so if anyone was caught doing so at school). And several were caught, they'd sneak off and smoke behind the toilet block down the end of the school yard. BTW, I wasn't one of them (and I don't smoke).
I said "cut back" not "cut out".
(And that's a significant issue in itself)
Breast cancer dropped with a step function when HRT was stopped in general for meopausal women.
I haven't seen any studies to the contrary.
Could be worth a look? I didn't dive into the study itself, but it seems decent at a glance.
They do tend to cause an increase in blood clots though. The risk is manageable in relatively fit women. In overweight/sedentary women that gets a bit harder to balance out.
That risk factor is specific to the oral route, and/or conjugated equine oestrogens. Injections, patches etc. of synthesised oestrogens don't seem to have that problem. https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k4810
> Transdermal preparations were not associated with risk of venous thromboembolism, which was consistent for different regimens
Don't eat your HRT: rub it on your gums!
It's not that frail people need to be inactive, but that inactivity causes frailty.
I can see a rapid increase in untrained people but more marginal increases in trained people because of this.
A 40% increase in bone density over 6 weeks sounds like someone’s DEXA scanner is broken. Bones just don’t change that quickly.
I've observed this as being a very widespread belief too, and it seems like we need to be giving women a better biology education or something, because holy shit is it wrong.
I guess it's more a misconception among the general non weight training public that this stuff is so easy you can basically develop a muscular, masculine body on accident.
For all but the youngest and most genetically blessed males it takes years of very specific diet and exercise regimes. Or steroids.
Whereas just adding some weighted squats into her routine will have immense health benefits for most women as well as making their body look more feminine and attractive.
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true, many men like “curvy” women, but generally even they are regularly working out. It would be more accurate to say that men dislike unhealthy women. But then you could say the same thing about men.
This sounds like some really insecure men
So I will say it again: any woman who thinks she will accidentally develop a masculine physique is a fool. She has a poor understanding of weight training and the human body.
Just as any man who thinks he'll get that physique on accident is also a fool!
> they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine
It's been done. It doesn't matter that you can't see the abs on 50% of the women on the Olympic team. Some think they'll get the physique of a professional body builder who's been abusing steroids for a decade anyway.
I've been lifting weights on and off for over a decade and although I do have visible abs, that's more by nature of low body fat percentage than lifting. The point is - no matter how hard I train, I've never even gotten close to what I would consider as "too big" for my preference. Even as your muscle mass increases, the end result just seems to be a more _compact_ and efficient look rather than "bulky" in any sense of the word.
The same applies to cardio, where the general population over-estimates the calories burned and imagines that all runners will become skeletons.
Once you get on this your only options are 1. use till you die 2. stop and face consequences of suppressed natural estrogen production from HRT.
Is that right?
I'm on bisphosphonate treatment (zoledronic acid), I've already had 5 of those injections and I recently learnt that it could lead to severe side effects and not that effective for treating Osteoporosis.
Meanwhile I underwent a genetic testing and the result came out as I have COMP8 mutation which leads to Multiple epiphyseal dysplasia or Pseudo-achondroplasia; Both of which affects bones to different extent and I have symptoms for both.
I'm now looking for treatments which can help improve my bone density or at-least prevent further deterioration, CCN3 looks really promising. I even started a project to monitor bone health using BMD (Dexa) reports[1] and to submit reports for research (I'm looking for researchers in this area).
1 in 3 women over the age of 50 years and 1 in 5 men will experience osteoporotic fractures in their lifetime, According to this article more than 200 million people worldwide suffer from osteoporosis but I feel investment in bone health research is not enough.
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/
Among the dozen other serious health problems with zero/low gravity like oh serious eye problems, humans sadly aren't going to Mars anytime soon.
Then again this would need to be tested on the moon or in orbit first, might not make a difference even with the hormone.
(vitamin K2 might help too)
For the trip, there are several ways we could set up spin gravity.
The real nasty problem would be getting back to Earth.
Once we have manufacturing capability on the Moon, we can build much larger ships that have some decent radiation shielding.
Of course, the low gravity causes a bunch more problems. But here again, with significant space- and Moon-based industry, we could build much larger ships with spin gravity. This doesn't help the people working on the Moon though, but at least here we could cycle them on and off the Moon every 6 months or so, since the trip is only 3 days, so they could come back to Earth and re-acclimate to 1g periodically.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/explorers-will-fac...
Lots of organs in the body lack regeneration capabilities once you age as an evolutionary mechanism to avoid tumors.
Uri Alon's book Systems Medicine has lots of models to explain those differences depending on e.g. organ size.
But yes, as a HRT user myself (age 38), I do see it as replacing the fluids in my car to make it operate like when it was peak tuned at age 22.
See this famous study: The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes. Science, 359, 424-428 (2018). doi:10.1126/science.aan6877. The summary literally states:
"Genetic variants in parents may affect the fitness of their offspring, even if the child does not carry the allele. This indirect effect is referred to as genetic nurture. Kong et al. used data from genome-wide association studies of educational attainment to construct polygenic scores for parents that only considered the nontransmitted alleles."
why is this so?
Besides, you have less lymphocytes looking for carcinogenic cells, as your immune system is older.
My aim isn't to make a long thread out of the topic but: while I'd agree it's one reason, I'd dispute it's primary. Demand for medicine is pretty inelastic, meaning there is generally a lot of power on the supply side to set high prices. Then you have the dynamics between health insurers and providers, the burdens of regulation and liability for adverse effects, the tendency to focus research and marketing on novel [patentable] remedies over potentially cheaper ones, and the tendency to focus on remedy over prevention. It's fairly difficult to pick a primary reason.
Sublingual Toradol is available from pharmacies in Mexico. I fly to San Diego every five years, take the tram to the border and walk across to Tijuana to stock up. Toradol is an NSAID they give you via injection in the emergency room for chronic pain and headaches. By mouth it tends to cause GI bleeding worse than any other NSAID. A number of people died before they restricted the pill to five days consecutive use. Dissolving Toradol under your tongue bypasses the GI tract, making sublingual Toradol much safer. I carry a pill pack of four pills in my wallet, and having a pain medication as effective as morphine without sedation in my pocket at all times seriously improves my quality of life. There is something I can DO when my chronic pain flares up enough that it starts to get to me.
In the US the Sprix nasal inhaler is the functional equivalent of sublingual Toradol. I've read the research papers on both medications and I compared the charts for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics and... the curves are virtually identical. They have the same impact on the body, both delivery mechanisms are equally effective in safety terms.
Sublingual Toradol is generic - the original papers on it are from the 80s. The Sprix is a patented delivery mechanism... wait for it...
* A dose of subligual Toradol in a Tijuana pharmacy: $0.25
* A single dose Sprix nasal inhaler from a US pharmacy: $25 last I checked. Only indicated for severe migraines.
That's a price multiple of 100x, as in one hundred times for a functionally equivalent medication. Last time I went to Tijuana the murder rate had multiplied by 10x since the last time I was there, so I went to the pharmacy right at the border. The price per dose was $0.50 there, but its cheaper if you go downtown. It isn't a counterfeited medication, so you don't have to worry about that. I wish more pain patients had access to sublingual Toradol. If a drug company wanted to improve chronic pain care, they could fund clinical trials in the US and get the medication approved. It will never happen in the states. Pure greed is the ONLY reason.
Actually, there's a lot more research on sublingual Toradol since I last checked: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22sublingual+toradol%... See the sublingual film work? No reason for that instead of a pill except you can patent it. BOOM. BURN IT ALL DOWN.
And later proceed to explain an example of two different patents based on a drug from the 80s improving nothing but changing just enough to patent it and sell it for 100x the generic.
However as a currently breastfeeding mother, I'm asked by doctors to take calcium supplements every day (I only remember it once a week or so), and they threaten me with future osteoporosis if I don't take it. But these researchers are saying that breastfeeding mothers' bones aren't affected despite calcium depletion?
Fwiw I've also read research that the bones are indeed affected (as measured by density) but they rebound after you stop breastfeeding. I remember that the most depletion happened in the lumbar region, and that the rebound didn't happen fully if there was "parity" (multiple kids).
So idk. I hope their premise is correct.
Yikes. How about one of those 7-compartment SMTWTFS pill boxes? Store it alongside your morning coffee supply.
I try to eat more yogurt/kefir instead.
I rather suspect that if you are already eating a diet deficient in calcium, breastfeeding may exacerbate the issue, and since the supplements tend to have a poor bioavailability, taking them even if you don't need to isn't going to be harmful. Eat a healthy balance of foods and you are probably fine.
I may have a nurse for a mother, but I am very much not a doctor.
[1] https://www.bonehealthandosteoporosis.org/patients/treatment...
I think, the transporter for calcium is the same used for some other minerals. So, if you're not mindful (about timing), you may be competitively blocking the absorption of e.g. zinc, which is much more precious nutritionally - zinc is very important for immune function and healing, while deficiency is common.
Calcium supplements can cause constipation, which may be not very fun after giving birth... Not to mention the implications of (lack of) quality control in the supplement market, by proxy, for a rapidly developing human being. Which substances are part of the formulation, other than calcium salts? Does the adult portion of copper or X accumulate in a mother's milk?
Not saying, you shouldn't take calcium supplements. But really, any supplement can be harmful, if consumed without need or consideration. (Fun fact: Vitamin A supplementation increases lung cancer risk!)
https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-first-tooth-regrowing-dr...
Imagine then how much we missed from male mice.
Why do they need strong bones in mice ? Biological weapons ?
So, uh, did this research involve breaking mice bones?
I think most ppl who do it just happened to find themselves in a part of their academic career where they have little choice if they want to proceed.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1003469,-94.5952033,3a,56.6y...
Here is another:
https://chicagostudies.uchicago.edu/back-yards/back-yards-un...
With or without monument, It always will have a very special place on my stomach.
This one is in Oxford: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bull_statue,_outside...
This one is in Budapest: https://www.kozterkep.hu/1005/boci-szobor
And of course there is that swiss artist who creates parades of cows around cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CowParade
By my morals it's ok to kill animals for the benefit of humans, animals kill animals for sustenance and for now we are still a part of nature. In the future perhaps we won't need to and I'll happily support that. For now in order to get to that future we must do the unpleasant thing with an understanding that it should be not be done egregiously, gratuitously, or needlessly. Not for the sake of the animals, although that is a given, but for the sake of the humans involved in harming those animals as I think doing such things does take it's toll.
Anyway, if you've ever seen a cat play with a half-dead mouse you might change your previous opinion on these experiments.
On the other hand, this research might lead to people putting patches on their jaws to stop the cosmetic effects of ageing.
Ethics is a difficult discipline ...
What I don't like is that the inefficiencies in science means that many, and perhaps most, of the experiments that are being done are probably unnecessary and only being done due to bureaucratic inertia. I lament the horrible state of science and the needless suffering that causes both humans and animals.
So on one hand I think it's possible to justify the what is in effect torture of animals if a case can be made that the science obtained from it could be worth it. On the other hand I don't think it's normally the case that this is true and science should do a better job in justifying this torture. If unable to then it should stop.
Everybody loves this when it happens to a human in a film, no matter how much radioactive spiders will be crushed. If this makes you feel better while watching your plaster dry, I would bet my money on that sedation was applied and, if that old mice is still alive, it feels now like a two months old heartthrob.
* I met my first real partner online- but that was on MySpace pre-appification of everything. I haven't dated anyone I met online since, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here.
Totally opposite of my experience when I was last using them. CL was absolutely full of scammers trying to send me cashier's checks for stuff. FBM had people who were real people, who actually came with cash to buy my stuff. FBM's UI was absolutely terrible, but it was worth it to avoid all the scamming on CL.
>Online dating seems miserable!
I met all my girlfriends on there in the past couple of decades. The latest one is working out wonderfully. Sure, there were some bad dates and some not-so-great people, but you'll get that anywhere.
"The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking."
- The mechanisms discovered work exactly the same way in humans. This is not a long shot at all, as mice aren't that far from humans genetically and physiologically.
- The mechanisms work slightly different in humans, pointing us to different natural solutions to a problem.
- The mechanisms work entirely different in humans, pointing us to potentially-important evolutionary divergences (maybe the biology was improved on in humans).
In any of these instances, the findings remain important, and "in mice" just cheapens that. After all, this work was published in Nature, which is still one of the top journals in any research field. The folks running the journal may have their issues, but they're not all idiots.
Edit: wording.
> Discoveries in mice involving novel biological mechanisms can be important [...]
If discoveries in mice can be important, then how does stating that they're in mice make them less important?
“One of the remarkable things about these findings is that if we hadn’t been studying female mice, which unfortunately is the norm in biomedical research, then we could have completely missed out on this finding,”
It is the main talking point of the Weinstein brothers on their podcast. But their main thrust is not the reasonable list of points by the OP, the Weinstein point is that all mice studies are meaningless junk science and don't mean anything.
So, the 'in mice' has become a moniker for 'bad science' from those on 'the right'.