
A curious result hints at the possibility dementia is caused by fungal infection - randomname2
http://www.economist.com/node/21676754/print
======
gus_massa
Previous discussion of the same research paper, from another URL:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401344)
(337 points, 8 days ago, 154 comments)

I'll copy partially a few cherrypicked comments of that thread:

pcwalton> _It 's not [published in] Nature; it's [published in Scientific
Reports that is] a "megajournal" affiliated with it with apparently much lower
editorial standards.)

\--

thanatosmin> _As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy
science. There is no quantitation of staining differences across multiple
fields (to demonstrate that the images aren't hand picked), no controls with
the PCR study (or even showing the results besides one in the supplement), and
no demonstration that the antibodies don't bind to amyloid.* [...]

\--

niels_olson> _Hi, I do research using the same methods: immunohistochemistry.
This was done with rabbit polyclonal antibodies. The key being polyclonal. We
don 't know what those antibodies are really staining. The difference,
however, is intriguing._ [...]

\--

nonbel> _I bet if they double stain with anti-amyloid-Beta they will see the
staining overlap. They just say they used "antibody raised against proteins
obtained from C. glabrata, C. famata, C. albicans, P. betae and S. racemosum",
so they don't even know (or want to say) what these antibodies react with..._
[...]

------
raphman_
Some of many critical comments from a previous discussion on HN (one week ago)
[1]:

> _" As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy
> science."_

> _" The discovery, if corroborated by others, could indeed be huge but I'm
> afraid it wouldn't open up new treatment options anytime soon. Fungal
> infections inside the body are really really hard to treat in the first
> place."_

> _" I bet if they double stain with anti-amyloid-Beta they will see the
> staining overlap. They just say they used "antibody raised against proteins
> obtained from C. glabrata, C. famata, C. albicans, P. betae and S.
> racemosum", so they don't even know (or want to say) what these antibodies
> react with..."_

> _" All of the Alzheimer's patients were 79 or older, while all of the
> control patients were younger than 79 except for one. More than half of the
> control patients were under 60. That doesn't seem like a very good control
> to me."_

> _" This article does NOT provide compelling evidence that fungi are the
> causative agent for AD. It merely reports correlative observations. You may
> conclude that antifungal drugs could help patients with AD. You may also
> think that vaccination or some other mechanism of prevention could reduce
> the prevalence of AD. These conclusions are simply not supported by the
> data."_

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401344)

------
moonshinefe
I really can't wait for the follow up investigations of these studies.
Alzheimer's is one of the worst diseases out there that will likely affect
most of us in some way in our lives, but yet it seems less talked about versus
say cancer and heart disease.

I still think mental illness carries a lot of stigma, and isn't talked about
as openly. It's getting better though, and studies like this make me excited
that perhaps a cure or significant treatment is possible in our lifetimes.

~~~
sbarre
What makes Alzheimer's so awful is the slow pace at which it takes away the
people you love. You see them slowly disappear while still being physically
there, over the course of years, and there's nothing you can do.

I lost my grandmother to it, and it was an incredibly, and increasingly,
painful 5 years for the entire family, to the point where we felt relief more
than grief when she finally passed.

I can only hope they find a cure or a treatment.

~~~
sokoloff
Very similar experience with my grandfather who passed this summer.

It's hard to pinpoint which stage of the disease is "the worst". Is it the
very early onset where the patient is still largely "there" but knows of the
inevitable decline, the middle stages where your function is so degraded that
you can't live fully alone, but you recall what it was like just a few years
ago to be able to live at home and you have no particular physical infirmity
to suggest that assisted living is right, or the end stage where you can only
recognize a few people and display significant concern/fear/mistrust of the
nursing staff who are doing their damnedest to help you?

Each stage is terrible in its own right, and the disease progression proved to
me that there are indeed medical fates far, far worse than death.

------
stenl
Intriguing findings, but antibodies (used here to detect fungi) are
notoriously prone to false positive findings. Direct shotgun sequencing of
brain DNA, in a blinded design with sufficient numbers of patients and
controls, would have nailed it. Actually, I wonder why they didn't do it
already? Maybe lack of money?

------
eveningcoffee
Unfortunately it also could be that fungal infection is caused (promoted) by
Alzheimer.

~~~
mhb
Fortunately, TFA mentions that possibility: _Do fungi usher in the disease, or
does the disease usher in the fungi?_

~~~
eveningcoffee
Hopefully it is possible to build an experiment (using models i.e. test
animals or test tissue (new mini brains maybe?)) to find it out.

