WTH Is Cerebrolysin, Actually?
moreisdifferent.blog
moreisdifferent.blog
- The Mighty Hakan
I got out of nootropics because anything that can make you lucid dream must have some kind of impact on your brain, and the ENTIRE culture of nootropics is based on being more productive at work (at least the forums I was on).
It was kind of gross, to be honest. Put these chemicals in your body so you can focus x% more at your job. No thank you.
But it can be more than that. It can be a calling. A passion. A way to gain immortal glory by being named the discoverer of something. A way to create value and happiness for others.
I used piracetam for a few months and functioned well on six hours of sleep per day (the norm is 1.5x that). Remembered dreams pretty well too (I very rarely remember them before or after that period).
It also greatly reduced the effects of alcohol intoxication, but that was more of a downside (strip ethanol of its effects on the mind and you get pure poison).
The were no other noticeable effects, and I stopped taking it because dosages were measured in hundreds of milligrams and I was worried about load on the kidneys.
It can be considered a benefit from a manufacturer's pov that their product doesn't work. If it did their customers would smarten up and stop buying it.
Anyway this looks like your typical "traditional" chinese medicine scam. I mean it has something to do with animal brains, of course it works, right?
Even if you are not very smart, doing some tests on yourself seems easy enough. If you pull up any psychology paper on like effecs of CO2 on cognition, and do the tests on yourself, you'd expect to start doing better after a few weeks of taking it, and if not stop. But I think most people that take products to help them improve just go by feel. I read a few nootropics articles back in the day and nobody ever proved any improvement larger than drinking coffee.
Do something well tested and proven to work instead and reap the benefits of all of these proven trained professionals. One idea: Acute Sprint Interval Exercise Increases Both Cognitive Functions and Peripheral Neurotrophic Factors in Humans.
[1]In the math class, we call it "studding for the midterm" :)
Prions is the first thing that came to mind after reading the description. I had not idea pigs are resistant to it. TIL.
Here I did that for you:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510857/
I trust NIH so my confidence that they write corresponds to truth is high even for the scientific interpretation of truth.
And that's what they wrote:
> Pigs were considered prion resistant as no natural cases have been observed despite a large population and being fed intensely with feedstuffs containing animal derived protein. However, it has been demonstrated that BSE is able to infect pigs albeit with low efficiency [...]
So, no, pigs are not resistant but more resistant than cattle and humans.
See header "As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.", and you can click on "Author information" to learn more about the authors.
Take this example of how I think: OP said, TIL that pigs are immune. This gave me misgivings.
I found a counter-proof from a government website I tend to trust, even if the material is not from them. So my confidence in the statement that pigs are immune went way down. In other words I am not sure that this statement isn't misinformation.
...what does 'resistant' mean if not 'less likely to be infected than something else is'? Is it not inherently a comparison?
That's what I meant, sorry for the confusion. I didn't mean that they are 100% immune just that they are more resistant. Perhaps that's the difference between a medical "resistance" vs the colloquial meaning.
I would definitely not jump into drinking raw pig brain smoothies either way and won't advise anyone else to do it either.
Don't think it made any difference, either positive or negative. The doctors thought it did, but I was misdiagnosed and as I learned later my EEG dynamics perfectly followed my real condition (which is expected to show huge improvement in EEGs with age starting around 6/7).
My EEGs are still bad, but not as remarkably bad as they were when I was a kid.
At least my family didn't pay for this questionable stuff, it was a free prescription.
"You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles."
Take the treatments for spinal muscular atrophy. If you’re born with the worst type, you die before age 2 from respiratory failure.
Today? Start treatment at birth and you live a normal life.
There have been miracle drugs released every decade or so since the early 1900s.
They're just normal now. They stop being a miracle once we're used to them.
People used to die of fevers. Of sepsis. And there was nothing that could be done. Let alone cancer.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-does-ozempic-cure-all-d...
Beyond their somewhat miraculous effects on obesity, they seem to have a wide variety of positive effects even for non-overweight people. They are likely the best and broadest thing we have for stopping negative addictions. They have incredibly positive effects for immune issues. Plus strong early trial results for Parkinson's, Alzheimers, and heart and kidney disease.
I also think they are underrated and there may be some alpha in them for a few reasons:
1. People seem to hate the idea that someone can "cheat" at losing weight, almost seeming to hope they have some unknown side effect.
2. People seem to dismiss them as "only working because obesity causes all those issues", probably the biggest fallacy as we have evidence already, and I think will find much more, that the addictive, immune, kidney and heart effects are not due to weight loss/fasting.
3. People don't seem to realize how huge a deal it is if they do have a strong effect on immune issues - immune system issues underly so many health issues of different names from allergies to Alzheimers to all sorts of terrible diseases, and I now know a couple non-overweight people who have reported nearly miraculous results with them.
4. Their effects on addiction likewise just by themselves are big. Another friend/smoker since high school, smokes nearly a pack a day tried it and for the first time since HS didn't smoke a cigarette for a whole day - multiple days in a row.
BTW it seems tirzepatide is significantly better for at least some of these effects than semaglutide.
(There's other interesting aspects of mph too - like how it can change sensitivities - and actually make light mode not feel like your eyes are on fire! - but that's a comment probably for another time.)
There’s an insidious issue: uninformed people tend to quickly assume that the patient is weak-willed and ate even if instructed to come NPO.
Not sure if one can call a set of drugs that are so in demand as to be basically impossible to get at times underrated. Possibly random people online say otherwise but the market says the opposite very strongly.
IIRC it's also hard on liver, esp. in combination with alcohol (which js unfortunate since it's otherwise good for hangover).
It is particularly neat because it's not just a pain suppressant, it's a general emotion suppressant.
> ... [it] blunts physical and social pain by reducing activation in brain areas (i.e. anterior insula and anterior cingulate) thought to be related to emotional awareness and motivation. [1]
It also reduces the empathy for pain. [2]
- Miracle drugs for curing ailments. We have plenty of those.
- Miracle drugs for enhancing beyond normal. Many things which work also have serious side-effects. Most things which are peddled with prescription don't have any effect.
For its clinical validity I do recall that it passed some clinical trails which I'd need to look up again however like most studies with cerebrolysin it was done in shadier more bribe friendly corners of the globe so its easy to dismiss the positives. Like the study on ADHD in adults done in russia where it massively helped the participants but the sample size was very tiny. Also I highly doubt that it actually cured "mental retardation in children" like some of the packaging claims.
EDIT: here we go for the clinical trails: https://go.drugbank.com/drugs/DB16599