
Enemy within: gut bacteria drive autoimmune disease - pilingual
https://news.yale.edu/2018/03/08/enemy-within-gut-bacteria-drive-autoimmune-disease
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allthenews
It is frustrating how slow medical progress is with respect to gut biota and
such personalized medicine.

This seems like the perfect place for machine learning and big data. What
exactly is the hold up? Is it regulations? Is it old fashioned doctors
unwilling to push boundaries?

Ive been dealing with mysterious stomach issues for a long time myself, and
I'm living for the day where I can hack something together to cure myself, at
this point I've lost faith in doctors; and my problems in the grand scheme of
things aren't even that bad, I can only imagine how other hackers must feel...

Edit: I've been getting my own ML startup off the ground just recently, but if
anyone is doing something in this area, even open source, I may be interested
in collaborating, let's talk!

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ianai
This place is trying: [https://viome.com/](https://viome.com/)

My guess is that human flora are orders of magnitude higher in complexity.
They all interact with one another and diet. It’s hard to find numbers, but at
least one place indicated over 500 different strains in the human gut.

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zxcb1
This type of analysis will probably be a cornerstone in future health
assessment. Since there are more cells and genes in the microbiome than in the
human body, it seems reasonable that different compositions may have profound
effects. Untangling this might take a while, meanwhile, changes in food
production, environmental degradation and pollution are probably affecting
microbial “landscapes” in detrimental ways. For now, options are limited to
experimenting with diets, switching to organic alternatives, and the most
radical method, temporarily change environment to isolate or eliminate the
causes. All these more or less worked for me, the last one most effective,
restoring a dysfunctional gut flora, however not permanently which speaks for
environmental factors beyond diet.

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kzrdude
I see a lot about autoimmune disease on Hacker News. I guess that it's a wide
medical area, that many can relate to?

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Daishiman
It's a set of conditions where most doctors' best answers are "beats me",
where conditions are extremely variable from individual to individual, and
where lifestyle changes can have drastic differences in outcome.

It is the ideal playground for the lifestyle hacker.

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trhway
>most doctors' best answers are "beats me"

i take your "beats me" doctors and raise you the gastroenterologist i saw
recently - he said straight out, end of discussion, "our infectionist doesn't
believe in candida in the gut"

As we have that saying in Russia - "the duty to save the drowning person lies
solely with the drowning person" ("spasenie utopayuschih delo ruk samih
utopayuschih")

~~~
CodeWriter23
My nephew gave a stool sample your gastrointerologist’s infectionist might
want to have a look at.

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mirimir
Immune responses to bacteria colonizing unusual tissues doesn't seem like
"autoimmune disease". That is, unless there's cross-recognition between
bacterial and host epitopes. But there are known examples of such molecular
mimicry.[0] Such as "Campylobacter jejuni lipooligosaccharide (LOS) mimicry of
human GM1 ganglioside and mimicry between the dietary antigen butyrophilin and
myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein". So maybe this is another example.

0) [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-
microbio...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-
microbiology/molecular-mimicry)

~~~
smnplk
I have hashimoto's thyroiditis autoimmune condition and I read somewhere that
one possible cause could be very subtle gluten allergy. So antibodies are
produced to attack a specific gluten protein, but this protein is similar in
molecular structure as the protein thyroid is made of, thyroglobulin, so at
the same time thyroid is attacked. Is this what molecular mimicry is ? I know
next to nothing about human microbiology, feel free to educate me. I really
should pick up a book on it if I want to experiment with my health, any
suggestions where to start ?

~~~
mirimir
Yes, that could be molecular mimicry. I hadn't heard of the thyroglobulin
gluten similarity. But Hashimoto's thyroiditis is associated with celiac
disease, which is clearly gluten related.

As the immune system matures in late fetal development, there's a stage when
all cells that can target self antigens get killed. However, some tissues are
isolated from the immune system, and so there are antigens there that don't
get on the "self list". The thyroid is one of them.

Everything is OK until the thyroid gets damaged, infected or whatever. Then
the immune system can see it, and may develop cell and antibody mediated
responses.

Like all proteins in food, gluten is normally digested, and never makes it out
of the gut intact. Only the component amino acids are transported to the
bloodstream. However, in celiac disease, where the gut lining is damaged, I
can imagine that some gluten gets across intact. Also many other proteins and
complex carbohydrates.

Then the immune system could respond to all that stuff. And some of it could
share epitope with thyroid components. So if there is an association between
gluten and Hashimoto's thyroiditis, it's hard to say whether gluten shares
epitopes with thyroid stuff, or whether it's just damaging the gut.

