6 ms·
Protein biomarkers predict dementia 15 years before diagnosis in new study
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- foolfoolz 3y agogreat step to figuring how we can prevent / cure these protein changes
- r-bryan 3y agoOK, but I'd rather prevent/cure the dementia.
- downrightmike 3y agoIs no one going to tell him? Should we?
- elromulous 3y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00565-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00565-0 ^ direct link to the paper.
- ncr100 3y ago"... plasma proteins, GFAP, NEFL, GDF15 and LTBP2 consistently associated most with incident all-cause dementia (ACD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD), and ranked high in protein importance ordering."
- m3kw9 3y agoNow is there something that can be done early or is it 15 extra years of suffering
- berdon 3y agoFrom what I understand, the medicine available is fairly successful at staving off further disease progression but the normal late stage diagnosis often means it’s far too late. This might make outcomes significantly better if it works as well as reported.
- ekianjo 3y agothe medicine available is just cherry picking clinical trial results to make it look better than placebo but it hardly does anything
- carbocation 3y agoThat is true for some diseases but not all. I don't think we know how to prevent dementia. But identifying biomarkers is useful, at the very least for selecting people for enrollment in future trials.
- hgomersall 3y agoProbably diet and exercise. Would be interesting to see an interventional study based on this.
- saiya-jin 3y agoSleep, maybe meditation, keep learning new challenging stuff (within given cognitive possibilities). Brain is a 'muscle' so keep pushing at it, continuously, you can only help it.
- tripflag 3y agoFwiw, at least one recent study indicates there is little benefit from exercising your brain: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(23)00169-9 https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136... related news article (in Norwegian): https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/forskning-viser-at-hjernetrim-ofte-har-lite-a-si-for-demens_-det-som-skjer-tidlig-i-livet-betyr-mer-1.16521180 https://www.nrk.no/trondelag/forskning-viser-at-hjernetrim-o...
- owenpalmer 3y agoIt's always encouraging to see progress in disease prevention. As a young person, I'm looking forward to what the medical field will be like when I'm 70.
- ekianjo 3y agoits not disease prevention its correlation.
- thfuran 3y agoFinding a novel correlate that precedes the other observed effects of the disease in question is progress in prevention.
- ekianjo 3y agopeople thought for years that amyloid plaques were driving the disease only to be proven utterly wrong you might want to have a bit of humility when dealing with complex systems
- steve_adams_86 3y agoI agree with you. I think being proven utterly wrong is a huge accomplishment nonetheless. We shouldn’t be sure of ourselves, but we should treasure any progress even if it’s in the form of negating causes rather than isolating them.
- zamfi 3y agoHmm. Are you saying that the fact that some knowledge is wrong means that it doesn’t represent progress? Correlation isn’t “cure” — we don’t even know if it’s predictive — but that doesn’t mean it’s not progress.
- ekianjo 3y agoprogress is measured by: - identifying mechanism of action - identifying therapeutic levers - testing drugs and ahow that they can do something we are not even at the first step with these biomarkers. observational studies are super noisy
- bglazer 3y agoOne caveat is that this is necessarily a retrospective study. The authors looked at historical data from the UK Biobank, ran a regression, and found these genes. So, it’s not really clear if these genes are actually causing dementia, or if they’re just related to a common cause, or (most likely) tied together through some very complicated web of biological mechanisms. That said, they’re interesting genes. GFAP is expressed in astrocytes, which are glial cells. These perform a lot of tasks in the brain, but they seem important in protecting neurons from toxic stresses. So, this may give us some additional insight into the role of glial cells like astrocytes in dementia.
- rwmj 3y agoIf it's predictive, does it matter?
- pama 3y agoYes it does. Think of typical notions of statistical significance when testing one new idea prospectively, say the concept of a p-value, or the AUC used in the paper. Now think instead of a rich dataset and you are free to fish for any of the possibly tens of thousands of signals for one signal or a combination of signals that match your result. Loosely speaking you are overfitting and the threshold for being surprised or having statistical significance is now much more strict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonferroni_correction
- rwmj 3y agoSure, but let's say that we test this and it is predictive on new data (not overfitting), but we have no idea at all how it works. It's still a useful test.
- pama 3y agoThe retrospective regression on a specific dataset might discover a true correlated quantity, if any true correlated quantities were there and their signal was more prominent than the combinations you get from the noise. However, this analysis will always discover a quantity that correlates, by design. These retrospective studies can prompt prospective studies for a correlated quantity (a biomarker in this case) and the careful analysis of the retrospective study methodologies and results can suggest the design of such prospective studies; if a prospective study works, then that is fantastic. The retrospective studies are mostly there for statisticians to figure things out for future tests, except when the signal is simple and phenomenal.
- buyohmarkers 3y agoGFAP as dementia biomarker isn't a new discovery. Here's a 2023 meta-analysis that used papers as old as 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10177296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10177296/
- mbreese 3y ago> Proteins (for example Glial Fibrillary acidic protein, GFAP) had previously been identified as potential biomarkers for dementia in smaller studies, but this new research was much larger and conducted over several years. The article (University press release) does mention this... but seeing a known suspect in the biomarker list would lend some confidence to any novel biomarkers found. So, it's good to see multiple studies having similar hits.
- buyohmarkers 3y agoTotally a good thing. There's a very long list of biomarker failures, and there's lots of analysis into why so many biomarkers fail in clinical applications. One starting point for reading: https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/59/1/202/5622131 https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/59/1/202/5622131
- rablackburn 3y agoThey mention this in the article, and of course, the scientific method means we _want_ to have more than one suggestive meta-analysis before we declare any kind of "discovery" at all. > Proteins (for example Glial Fibrillary acidic protein, GFAP) had previously been identified as potential biomarkers for dementia in smaller studies, but this new research was much larger and conducted over several years.
- ransom1538 3y agoI can't wait until we all find out it is from dentists or people picking their noses.
- hanniabu 3y agoWhy would it be from dentists?
- ransom1538 3y agoprions "Oral manifestations are rare. Evidence suggests that the risk of transmission and acquisition of a prion infection as a result of dental treatment is rare, if appropriate infection control measures are maintained." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000281771465443X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00028... nose picking https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10669446/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10669446/
- quickthrower2 3y agoI wonder what kinds of useful stuff dogs can smell already… but they can’t say anything!
- johnnyanmac 3y agoThe most common but always impressive story I hear is that some dogs can smell cancer developing months or even a year before an official diagnosis. It honestly makes me wonder if the true next step for medical tooling should focus on enhancing human smell instead of sight to expand our spectrum or magnify microbes. as another random trivia, many animals can often feel or hear an earthquake minutes to days in advance, demonstrated by unusual behavior. This is even less consistent but a phenomenon observed for millenia (wheras we didn't even properly name understand cancer until a few centuries at best).
- xattt 3y ago> enhancing human smell Is this not a form of spectroscopy?
- loceng 3y agoAre these protein biomarkers also associated with inflammation in the body, perhaps diet-specific inflammation?
- xkgt 3y ago> Of 1,463 proteins analysed, aided by with a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, 11 proteins were identified and combined as a protein panel, which the researchers have shown to be highly accurate at predicting future dementia. I understand that press releases are intended for non-technical folks but I don't get the point of this description. Is it assumed that machine learning is less understood than artificial intelligence?
- sr-latch 3y agoa scientists view of the common man's knowledge is very distorted
- megamix 3y agoDoes this mean that big pharma can celebrate and sell more drugs?