Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle
rachel.fast.ai
rachel.fast.ai
After giving birth, my sister suddenly developed something similar to celiac disease (but not quite the same; I don’t think doctors ever figured out exactly what it is) to where she can’t eat grains and a few other types of food as well. I used to get eczema occasionally, but now it seems to have morphed into a permanent rash that continuously moves to different locations over my body. And my wife had food allergy testing done a couple of years ago due to constant stomach pain and has now eliminated chocolate, seafood, peaches, and many other foods from her diet.
It’s bizarre. We really need to figure out what’s going on before everyone has a diet prepared by their pharmacist alongside all of the pills needed to cope with their autoimmune pain.
* wear a mask in crowded environments where showing my face doesn't buy me anything (I don't wear one at work, but do at the grocery store or airport)
* wash hands before eating (or at least use hand sanitizer)
* grip the exit handle of the bathroom with a paper towel and dispose of it on exit
Not exactly double blind demonstrated but low cost and this year has been much better than last (which may also be due to my immune system having caught back up, too, so YMMV)
I would say most people do wash their hands here, however I have seen everything. From people not washing them to people using the toilet, not washing them, and then sitting on the table for lunch.
My father would wash hands after petting a dog even, so I guess it's his germophobia that set the standard in my household.
A good number of people do this in my city: when I go on public transit, I see a fair number of commuters with a hand sanitizer bottle clipped to their bag with a carabiner. Many people also have a bottle in their pockets or purse.
I would go out to lunch with mu coworkers and I would give out everyone wet wipes because I was the only one who had them, specifically for this.
No, we order first and then do it.
I was certainly raised to do it.
As of 15 years ago, according to my doctor, while on the antibiotic, sacchromyces boulardi is the best probiotic to take to try to minimize the risk of adverse consequences.
Seems like a good idea. Is that a common thing? Does the evidence support this?
Personally I try to take some biotic food - yoghurt and the like
Rifaximin, and antibiotic designed to stay in your gut, has been approved for treating specific types of IBS. When it works it can induce remission for months or longer.
I sometimes wonder if the intense stress and whatnot that I had experienced prior some how made me more susceptible to whatever illness I happened to succumb to? No way to truly know, I suppose.
After various specialists and unhelpful treatments for what was later deemed to be "IBS", I was recommended to try something by my GP. He gave me some antibiotic (this was 15 years or so ago) it may have been that one -- Rifaximin -- I know it started with an "R." Anyway, my GP warned me that he came across it in some research, and would be willing to give a try, but I was not to get my hopes up.
I took the antibiotics for 14 days. Towards the end of the regiment, I was starting to have symptoms far worse than normal, but I pushed through. 15 years or so later, I basically have no issues at all. Whatever the drug was it was like a freaking miracle cure.
The positive changes seem sticky!
So I stayed away from it for a couple years, then decided to cautiously try some Doritos again, and no reaction. Today, I'm not allergic to yellow 6 at all.
One thing I wondered while being allergic to it, was how much could I take before triggering the reaction. It ended up being extremely little. A single dorito chip would set it off. After that, I just cut it out of my diet completely.
Another weird thing is the reaction would last about 45 minutes exactly every time. I'd be sitting on the toilet bent over in agony, watching the clock.
It took me forever to figure out because poultry is often a filler meat.
Everything failed. And then, one day her normal brand of shampoo (which she had been using for 5+ years, and is advertised for sensitive skins) ran out, and she didn't get a chance to buy it for a couple of weeks. To her surprise, no eczema during those weeks! She changed her shampoo brand, and her eczema problems are gone, at least for now.
My point is, if you are trying to selectively eliminate things from your diet/lifestyle to figure out the trigger of your eczema, don't ignore things that you have been using for years before your eczema started.
I don't know the article knows as much as they think they do about health, because using muscles also damages them. I been nursing a bicep injury for the last 4 months.
I get its not a prefect analogy, but nothing is, else it would be the same thing
I don't think people should go licking railings, but total avoidance of germs is quite harmful. that's a fact.
This isn’t the argument being made in the article.
Despite me getting on a crammed bus every morning and afternoon to go working in the same room as about 80 other people 4 days a week I didn't get COVID (that I know of) until now.
Sometimes we are just lucky. Maybe the vaccine worked better-than-average for us. Maybe the route of infection works less well for us. Maybe we had it without noticing it at all
But it's also easy to test multiple times, and often enough the symptoms will confirm it.
I did not mean to confirm the parent, but give a version that is similar but probably just chance.
You don't.
You probably haven't been exposed at all, or you're one of the lucky asymptomatic people.
For example, I live in a major city, and am constantly around people post-vaccine. Yet I've had Covid 3x since them.
You can't draw the conclusion you're making from your behavior in public, as there's so many other likely possibilities.
Whether asymptomatic or not infected at all seems like a distinction without a difference. Either way I didn’t miss work, vacations, or get noticeably harmed. The whole point of my strategy was to expose my immune system to germs it was well equipped to fight off quickly and expose it continuously so I didn’t encounter it after it had mutated too much to be recognized.
I’m well aware of the pitfalls of anecdata, I just thought my approach was different enough from what most people did to be worth sharing. There will be no studies to test my strategy, so all we can have is my anecdotes.
I lost this battle long ago, didn't I...
Been collecting for a while. Latest success was supplementing with a probiotic specifically for oxolates. Prepare the gut with l-glutamine and silicea if you go that route
I was getting a rough depression after eating certain foods. My/my doctors current hypothesis is my liver was producing too much bile acid and triggering a condition known as bile acid malabsorption. This would basically wipe my gut out. I couldn’t absorb nutrients correctly so my mood and energy levels would drop.
I now know it lasts a few days if I goof up my diet, but it use to appear chronic since I was basically triggering it daily.
"A prospective study of dietary intake of vitamin D found women with daily intake above 400 IU had a 40% lower risk of MS. [53] In a study among healthy young adults in the US, White men and women with the highest vitamin D serum levels had a 62% lower risk of developing MS than those with the lowest vitamin D levels. [54]"
"Another prospective study in young adults from Sweden also found a 61% lower risk of MS with higher serum vitamin D levels; [55] and a prospective study among young Finnish women found that low serum vitamin D levels were associated with a 43% increased risk of MS. [56] In prospective studies of persons with MS, higher vitamin D levels have been associated with reduced disease activity and progression. [57,58]"
"Collectively, the current evidence suggests that low vitamin D may have a causal role in MS and if so, approximately 40% of cases may be prevented by correcting vitamin D insufficiency. [59] This conclusion has been strengthened substantially by recent evidence that genetically determined low levels of vitamin D predict higher risk of multiple sclerosis."
"While this may largely be due to genetic differences, some studies suggest that T1D rates are lower in sunnier areas. Early evidence suggesting that vitamin D may play a role in T1D comes from a 30-year study that followed more than 10,000 Finnish children from birth: Children who regularly received vitamin D supplements during infancy had a nearly 90% lower risk of developing type 1 diabetes than those who did not receive supplements. [61]"
"A prospective study among healthy young adults in the US found that White individuals with the highest levels of serum vitamin D had a 44% lower risk of developing T1D in adulthood than those with the lowest levels. [63]"
"The Vitamin D and Omega 3 trial (VITAL), a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial following more than 25,000 men and women ages 50 and older, found that taking vitamin D supplements (2,000 IU/day) for five years, or vitamin D supplements with marine omega-3 fatty acids (1,000 mg/day), reduced the incidence of autoimmune diseases by about 22%, compared with a placebo. Autoimmune conditions observed included rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, polymyalgia rheumatica, and autoimmune thyroid diseases (Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Graves’ disease). [80]"
I wasn't prepared for how much I'd fall in love with him though.
Some of my fondest memories are of my son playing with our dog. At night my dog would sleep by the feet of my son, and if he woke up he would simply turn around and use my dog as a pillow. I found them sleeping like that or spooning a couple of times a week.
Our dog made our house dirty in about the same way a two year old would, but more spread out. His fur was 10cm long and would dispense dirt, soil, bugs, small branches and so on for several hours after a walk despite us literally vacuuming him.
HAVE to? Dressing them up is one of my favorite parts.
We already know that women are more susceptible to auto-immune responses and that pregnancy is one of the reasons for that disparity between the sexes (carrying a foreign invader for 9 months plays with the expression of immunity genes in a manner that occasionally - rarely, at a population level - backfires.) And we know that the risk for an autoimmune "malfunction" rises with age. Thus there will obviously be random clusters of people, with more women who've given birth and and average age that skews older than, say, 30 - to which you unfortunately seem to belong - where there are more autoimmune responses than the average population.
What's funny is that in response to this post there are multiple posts each suggesting their own conspiracy. I wonder if this actually points to something, or it too is a just random noise.
Haha, unfortunately you would be correct.
> in response to this post there are multiple posts each suggesting their own conspiracy. I wonder if this actually points to something, or it too is a just random noise.
After I posted my original comment full of personal anecdotes, I thought “It’s always my useless posts that get the most responses.” Checking HN later in the day confirmed my suspicion.
As a data scientist, there are certain fields of study concerning the physical world that overwhelm me with the vast number of baseless and likely wrong theories within them: psychology, sociological, and medicine. Basically any field that attempts to study the human body or mind.
We likely have sufficiently advanced ML and inference techniques by this point to discover the true root causes of allergies and autoimmune disease (and all disease for that matter), but unfortunately this is a case where the problem is the data, not the algorithm.
We have no reasonable system in place to accurately collect, process, and store vast amounts of observational health data. And beside the data quality concerns, the privacy implications of attempting to store all of that sensitive data securely are mind-boggling.
Nevertheless, with observations from billions of people, it seems like even simple techniques could extract a lot of signal from the noise, which is just too difficult with the tiny number of low sample, high variance RCT studies we currently use. When you’re trying to predict causation from one or a few variables, it’s simple. When you’re considering thousands of variables at once, it’s next to impossible.
On the other hand, RCTs gather relatively well-conditioned data. And we have enough study power across them that we end up with a lot of statistically significant, real findings.... that still have effect sizes that aren't clinically meaningful.
We even know about things with large effect sizes that are controlled by a few variables, that are rare enough that it's hard to find the patients that they apply to.
And, of course, correlation ain't causation: if we used your system and found a bunch of things, we'd still need to figure out how to reduce them down enough to be something we could test before advising practitioners to do things a certain way.
I was seeing the allergist for my eczema and he asked me if I experienced symptom relief when traveling abroad, which I did in Honduras. He thought I may have been exposed to a parasite there that diverted my overactive immune response. go figure.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/
Excess calorie intake causes chronic inflammation, which gradually causes a plethora of other problems. There's also autoimmune conditions as a consequence of viral infections, so many of that from covid in recent years.
If you want to reduce inflammation you should exercise regularly. This seems obvious but, to me, people will come up with conspiracy after conspiracy to explain this. But the basics - moving a bunch - work really well. The American Lifestyle is progressively more and more sedentary, and we're blaming our woes on sunscreen or something.
PFAS and microplastics everywhere, rises in autoimmune diseases as well as allergies and Alzheimer's. Addictive amounts of sugar in a lot of food. GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic.
None of these people actually care about us. If we don't get an understanding of what's healthy and how to get rid of all of this artificial poison we're probably going to end up in the Idiocracy timeline.
I don't necessarily think this is the case, at least the US. It's time consuming and expensive to get testing done without an actual diagnosis, even with healthcare. Taking the time off or spending the money on allergy testing just isn't going to take command of the budget over necessities or more serious healthcare needs.
You're right about the rest of it though, but IMO the systemic issues with money in politics prevents anything from being done about it at the moment, and I don't know what it would take to push the working class into a general strike or revolt.
If you buy commercial products, the non-GMO seeds are unquestionably being sourced from the very same GMO vendors, and thus can't be trusted either.
Goes without saying. It’s rare to find GMO vegetables even commercially (only zucchini and potatoes even could be), let alone in a garden.
But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about ensuring the GMO vendors haven’t ever touched the seed. How are you ensuring provenance as to avoid the trust issues?
If you're trying to do a "reflections on trusting trust" reference, well, this is the real world. You might not ever be 100% sure that something is what it says it is (you might be a brain in a jar!), but it's usually better to get it from the guy you trust than the guy you don't.
Of course, at least within some margin of contamination. Identity preserved allows no more than 0.5% contamination, which is the best in the biz. But, the problem is that the earlier commenter didn't trust GMO vendors, not GMOs themselves. As in: Non-GMOs from a GMO vendor are equally untrustworthy. Hell, even a hat with a GMO vendor's logo on it is untrustworthy according to that commenter.
Unless you're sticking to food that doesn't have GMOs to begin with (which, to be fair, is almost all food!), you're going to be searching high and low to find a vendor that doesn't also dabble in GMOs.
All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.
I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.
I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.
Don't be so sure. We don't really know what messed up with our satiety/hunger signals.
"our gluttonous foodie culture."
Our which one? Obesity is a global problem, not a specifically American one. You will meet a lot of obese people in Brasilian favelas or rural Serbia, not exactly places that have "foodie culture".
"Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024"
I am not trying to discourage you, but the main stumbling stone with obesity is not losing the weight, but keeping it off for years. Your comment would carry a lot more weight (pun intended) if you lost that weight in 2020 and kept it off until today.
Opinion: nothing. Our hunger/satiety signals are normal and evolutionarily advantageous. What changed was the access, and composition, of food.
Food is tasty. Like really tasty these days. High fat, sugar, salt. And it's super duper easy to get. This stuff is designed to perfect target your brain and make you say "mmm".
You wanting to eat more makes sense because these foods are highly, or over, nutritious. Cavemen didn't have fried chicken, they barely had chicken - they had nuts. This wanting to eat more and more is evolutionarily advantageous. Because you don't know when your next meal is. You should be greedy, eat as much as you can and as often as you can. I mean, look at dogs. Give them infinite access to foods and they will eat themselves to death. Sure we're smarter but much of this stuff is at a level below the brain.
For all of human history I'm sure this functionality was a very good thing. Now that we have food surplus... not anymore. And to top it off, for the first time ever, we don't need to move to live. People are sedentary. So we don't even offset this effect with movement.
It seems to me the human brain/body is incompatible with modern human life. We're broken. We're exploitable by addiction at every turn. The solution might be to change our brains. Ozempic seems to help a lot - less drinking and smoking too.
Vietnamese people in Czechia are also usually thin, even though they make more than average money, being either business owners or skilled professionals. The contrast with Czechs is visible.
I'm actually baffled that anything I mentioned would be considered "completely meaningless".
Realistically, this and seed oils are the only place you are going to really encounter GMOs. If you are avoiding such processed food anyway...
> GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic.
If you really must binge on the junk food and are concerned about any GMO content, why are you paying extra for organic? Why not just buy non-GMO products?
I think that is hard, since non-GMO can still contain GMO. Organic is a bit stricter, but I think also not 100% GMO free.
(Personally, I don't care about GMO, but organic)
This is inaccurate - the other day I wanted to get some cookies for a child - label said sugar content was like 25%, that's insane. I have baked cookies myself, you don't need that much sugar to get decent tasting cookies, they are not suppose to be junk food. it's everywhere, not just chocolates, even in bread.
It better be a malevolent conspiracy, because if not, then it's suicidal stupidity of our species.
Like the average bread meant to be highly appealing to the consumer isn't also junk food? Again, the only real sources of GMO products you are apt to find out there are corn-based (HFCS) and seed oils (soybean and canola). While you can make bread with those products, that doesn't mean you need to.
I think we can agree that there are breads that wouldn't be considered junk food, but they also wouldn't contain GMOs, because the ingredients typically used to make that type of bread literally have no GMO option anyway. (Yes, there was once a GMO wheat in the lab, but never became commercially available.)
Yup, there are people who subscribed to the system and there are people that opted out.
I don't even try to explain to people anymore. If I did I am pretty sure there would be a downvote frenzy and then Dan might even get pinged.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01614...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18266879/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18086216/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352773611_Health_ef...
I'm not a medic but I recall this being disproven or shown to be at least partially a myth a few years ago - https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/humans-have-salam... from 2020, for example. Researchers showed that ankle cartilage is younger than knee- and younger still than hip cartilage. Indicating that it grows back in ankles relatively quickly.
As the article says, analogies can mislead us, but this didn't inspire confidence.
I could probably dismiss it if the article weren't about being scientifically precise and dispelling myths relating to human biology.
Good piece, but the title is misleading too as the conclusion appears to be "it's complicated; yes and no".
>Using motion capture and sophisticated computer modeling, the study confirms that running pummels knees more than walking does. But in the process, the authors conclude, running likely also fortifies and bulks up the cartilage, the rubbery tissue that cushions the ends of bones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/well/move/why-running-won...
Same situation with resistance training lightly damaging and rebuilding muscles over time and actually tearing a large part of a muscle which leaves lasting damage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/28/torn-acl-...
The information about the hygiene hypothesis and how it is really more about "old friends" is also very important and not widely understood. Many don't know about the hygiene hypothesis at all and those who do usually interpret it incorrectly.
Infections with typical rhinoviruses and coronaviruses build adaptive immunity to those viruses (as well as those that are genetically similar). This typically reduces the severity of subsequent infections. They didn't stay around for years.
When we talk about things that "strengthen" or "weaken" the immune system that's really an oversimplification. There's a lot more going on in the complete system.
I could say the same about your comments here. What's your evidence?
You say the article isn't fully truthful. Where are your sources to back up your claims? What are your credentials? Or are you just pulling it out of thin air?
https://shop.elsevier.com/books/basic-immunology/abbas/978-0...
To reiterate something from a recent discussion on air purifiers [0], if your body is a civilization of cells then activating the adaptive immune system is like unleashing Skynet [1] to stop a potential zombie apocalypse.
Even if Skynet reliably wins, you're losing at least a few cities as glowing craters, and each time you're rolling the dice hoping that not too many of the murder-bots go rogue before you can make them self-destruct or go back into storage. You definitely do not want to slam that big red button just because of one police report of a human biting another human, or a report that a bunch of people with green skin are marching down the road, etc.
As we studying the adaptive immune system, we keep discovering safety-interlocks and subtle feedback loops, which presumably evolved because our relatives without them simply tore themselves apart a bit too often.
So it isn't strange. In the same way that we don't consider it strange that 100 years ago, virtually every human had parasites. It is only the last 40 or so years that most of the meat you can buy at a grocery store doesn't. And if you are still buying "wild caught" fish, it is almost certainly with parasites.
What is strange is thinking that people didn't care about parasites. People care. But there is shockingly little most can do to change it.
As far as an actionable thing goes, my N == 1 experience says that regular nasal rinsing reduces both frequency and severity of various common colds a lot.
I used to be down with sore throat, running nose and light to moderate cough some 5-6 times a year, since I was a kid until my early 40s. Once I started with the flushing, it all went away. Nowadays, about twice a year I "catch" something, which means a single night of chills and sweating, and in the morning I am fine again. The mucous membranes seem to be no longer susceptible. No sore throat ever etc.
That said, this is an interesting suggestion to follow my post. It literally only works if you have access to clean, probably distilled, water supply. If you don't, you are also introducing a path for some serious problems into your sinuses in the form of parasites.
A good antibacterial filter + boiling that filtered water just to be sure goes a long way. That equipment is nontrivial, but for someone in a developed economy, usually affordable. Probably cheaper than being sick often, because even European welfare states often won't give you anything for first days of sickness.
You are correct that boiling it can probably help a lot. You then have to store it in a clean spot for it to cool to a temperature you can use, of course. Something that probably relies more on modern technology than makes sense.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230519-the-viruses-that...
https://www.science.org/content/article/viral-fossils-our-dn...
I hope with mRNA vaccines perhaps we will eventually get effective EBV and HSV vaccines, which will be big given (for example) EBV's links to multiple sclerosis.
* "4 out of 5 dentists agree" except it's more like the 50th dentist, given research consensus
Certainly for some of these -- say, Chicken Pox -- we know that early and controlled exposure is preferable to a first case later in life. And that the cycle of herd immunity in survivors leads to endemicity and less deadly strains.
It seems like both things can be true: it's best not to get infections at all, but if you live in a world where you will get infected, doing so early and outside a correlated epidemic can be advantageous. And, while our immune system evolved for a different social density, it still plays a critical role in mitigating the long-term collective impact of crowd infections.
I can't say a whole lot -- positive or negative -- came from it, but it was easy to do and inexpensive. So even though the article says you shouldn't try it at home, I did. I consider it safe. I'm not a doctor, I just read a lot of PubMed, so take that for what it's worth.
Googling how it was then:
>Around 12,000 years ago and earlier, life expectancy was about 33 years. Infections, such as diarrheal diseases that led to starvation and dehydration, were the leading cause of death, accounting for about 75% of deaths.
so the modern stuff is not so bad really.
It's just that you have to start your analysis somewhere, and, obviously, our own evolutionary branch (i.e. homo sapiens) is the most relevant.
But a vaccine does something analogous: it "exercises" the immune system (hopefully harmlessly) to strengthen it for when real pathogens are encountered.
So between vaccines, and natural immunities developed by exposure to and recovering from a disease, the "getting stronger with use" comparison is generally correct.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
This post reads like someone who has just discovered the world of ME/CFS/LongCovid (post viral) /ToxicMold/POTs/SIBO/IBS/Lymes/hEDS/Graves/Hashimotos/MS/Lupus etc. etc. As a lifer I have seen many people enter the space and go through this exact same early stage of discovery.
What I really think it is; it's genetic, various types of generalized anxiety disorders with their associated auto-immune conditions with the most common being Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos. These genetic predispositions are made worse by diet and lifestyles and triggered by all manner of stressors.
On how to treat it, Low Dose Naltrexone is a good step one, then meds for dysautonomia, TUDCA, 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM), and then finally I think Low Dose Semaglutide < 0.1mg per week is going to be huge for auto-immune. It's early stages but few things have appeared more promising in the patient community. It worked wonders for me and a few other people I know. Everyone is different but those are in my opinion a good place to for someone starting.
Helminths did not work for me the several times I tried it and have not worked for anyone that I have personally known that has tried it which to date is around ~10pp. But I do believe the people who do say it has worked for them but I don't count them unless I knew them prior due to the issue of selection criteria biases.
Although it's way more complicated than that and there are exceptions, but it's still a real phenomenon.
Community deworming increases Th1 cytokines https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098677/
When you administer helminths to yourself there is no guarantee that they are going to the right spot in your body, etc. which explains why everyone responds differently.
Since my first COVID infection, I ended up with repetitive thoughts, short term memory problems, difficulty focusing, light sensitivity, fatigue ...
It got better but it seems that seasonal allergies re-trigger some kind of cascading inflammation and I've been useless for most of the summer.
Are you talking specifically about long-COVID?
Those listed conditions are a set of overlapping clusters that have a lot in common. Some of the listed conditions do have distinguishing comorbidities. The things you listed does appear squarely in the shared comorbidities and not in any of the distinguishing comorbidities - so it could be any number of things. The Ulcerative Colitis does increases the likelihood that it's hEDS which is already the highest likely predisposition @ ~2% of general population and higher for the HN population and even higher again for physics people (not the published figures of 1/50K, 1/15K, or the 1/500 which I consider to be incorrect due to the incorrect assumptions for disease state thresholds in the diagnostic tests).
Probably the best lens to look at it would be through the lens of dysautonomia which is a balance of a not well understood by the vast majority of doctors yet reasonably well understood by a few doctors - enough to be able to find decent information in medical research. My preferred meds for treatment of dysautonomia are modafinil and amitriptyline and these meds also act as immunomodulators - the same thing the helminths are supposed to help with. Modafinil can exacerbate gastro issues so in my view people who have those issues should focus on amitriptyline first (at the sleep aid doses not the depression doses). And googling it now it does appear that amitriptyline is indeed a known treatment for Ulcerative Colitis.
Also very funny you inspect my account to figure out I'm a physicist.
With enough data it's possible to disambiguate between genetically linked behaviors and learned behaviors because of the different diffuse patterns through disparate populations. The summary is that behavior and intelligence is absolutely dominated by genes, there is really only a 13% residual - so on a nature vs nurture spectrum the nurture is less than 13%.
The stronger the selection criteria bias on intelligence the more likely a RCCX gene variant (SNPs) will be selected, specifically TNXB (burnout / ME/CFS), C4 (schizophrenia), and CYP21A2 (generalized anxiety disorder).
You may wonder why this doesn't come up in GWAS studies - usually there is an assumption of independence of SNPs due to the idea that most SNPs are very old and genetic drift has been sufficient to provide this independence. Since these individual SNPs are so behaviorally impactful there a strong sexual selection bias that takes place so those assumptions don't hold and thus the math is bunk. I could spend forever talking about the incompetence of medical research.
Dr Jessica Eccles is probably doing the best research where she talks about the shocking 'overrepresentation' of Generalized Hypermobility Disorders (GHD) in the Long Covid populations. In my view the only difference between GHD and hEDS is the number and severity of TNXB SNPs, so while 2% of the population are impacted most of those are only mildly impacted. The co-occurrence of multiple TNXB SNPs is much higher random chance - again from the aforementioned sexual selection biases. In general researchers into such conditions assume TNXB SNPs are far too common to cause such a rare disease, the thing is that it's not a rare disease - just rarely diagnosed and surfaces in a variety of complex ways that look completely different to the untrained eye.
You can get a Deep Whole Genome Sequence for ~ $280 from dantelabs and then you'll know for sure.
Bacterial viruses may have been involved in the evolution of nuclei https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j....
The adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates itself probably wouldn't be around if a virus hadn't infected the gametes of our fishy ancestors https://www.nature.com/articles/29457 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686171/
More likely is that there is a critical time window during the development of the immune system when it is trained not to react to most bacteria (which are passed on from the mother's vaginal microbiota and harmed by cesarian sections and early antibiotic use). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904599/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464665/
There's more and more evidence that one person's commensal bacteria can be someone else's pathogen, and that we should really think about it as a "lock and key" with your immune system rather than categorizing bacteria as inherently good or bad. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5300855/
Another rarely mentioned complication though is that the successful immune response itself likely selects for more pathogenic microbes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/
Removing selective pressure from pathogens can actually lead to less virulent strains. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30100182/
That may be why the body spends considerable resources feeding the microbiota at a slow pace using by secreting mucus which contains a large amount of sugars, but which are attached using an extreme amount of diverse linkages so that one bacteria cannot sweep the field and take over. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1134114/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-023-00468-3
You cannot really withhold food from bacteria, they will just eat you. But if you give them a slow trickle of sugar, you remove their reason to invade you (which is is at a risk to themselves). I personally think this concept can be applied to wars and immigration, but anyway..
Why are viruses more likely to cause autoimmune diseases than parasites? Probably because viruses go inside us and set of (Th1) intracellular responses , whereas parasites set of extracellular responses (Th2). You're probably more likely to be tricked into attacking yourself when you are fighting off something inside yourself than something outside your cells.
For example, the IgE protein present in peanut allergy is part of the parasite-fighting machinery of the immune system. It's not supposed to be reacting to food. But when there are no parasites to fight, it doesn't just become dormant as we would like.
However the original article talks about 'peaceful' commensals and links to this post (https://rachel.fast.ai/posts/2024-04-25-microbiome-1/), with the example that "friendly" microbes may not trigger your immune system if they leak into your bloodstream because they 'look similar' to your pancreatic cells.
While critical during the development of the immune system, this idea that there are certain actually 'friendly' or peaceful bacteria is less and less supported by the literature, and overstated to the point of probably being harmful. Even probiotic strains can be harmful if your immune system is overloaded or incapacitated.
Strong immune avoidance or induction of tolerance outside of the critical window is a strategy often used by pathogens to escape host defenses.
Viruses are even harder to study than bacteria, which are already very difficult because most of them can't be cultured in a lab [1], so we just haven't studied them that much. It's a lot easier to study viruses that cause a disease because we know what to look for. The gut virome [2] alone is likely to contain a lot of commensal viruses that help us fight off parasites but our understanding is in its infancy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_dark_matter
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
Doesn't this categorically mean cartilage injuries never fully recover because the cartilage doesn't grow back?
"The immune system is an example of antifragility in the natural world since an effective response is only produced in the presence of an antigen threat, but the response leaves the body better able to respond in future. The presence of an antigen activates the immune response, which not only deals with the immediate challenge through the innate immune system in the short term and long term through the adaptive immune system but also provides ongoing protection against this and similar future threats through the immunological memory of B cells. In other words, exposure to an invading antigen leaves the body stronger than before, so the stressor has created a benefit that was neither present nor possible before it occurred."
read more: "Beyond resilience: towards antifragility?" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13108278257209181...
------
And see the -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation
"Variolation was the method of inoculation first used to immunize individuals against smallpox (Variola) with material taken from a patient or a recently variolated individual, in the hope that a mild, but protective, infection would result. Only 1–2% of those variolated died from the intentional infection compared to 30% who contracted smallpox naturally. Variolation is no longer used today. It was replaced by the smallpox vaccine, a safer alternative. This in turn led to the development of the many vaccines now available against other diseases."
The biggest risk here is either a chemical contaminant from a non-foodsafe cleaning product on your floor, or a physical one like a small shard of broken glass sticking to it.
"Current research suggests that several mechanisms, such as molecular mimicry, epitope spreading, and bystander activation, can cause viral-induced autoimmunity."
And that's why all the real experts made sure to properly communicate the risks vs benefits of the Covid vaccine in an age, sex, and dose-stratified fashion, right? Oh wait...