
Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease - wilder
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15015
======
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.

~~~
moyix
Could you elaborate on what polyclonal means here? Does it mean that they
might not have detected fungus after all, but some other thing that would
activate the same antibodies?

~~~
dnautics
Yeah, but that's true for monoclonals too, just a matter of degree.

A polyclonal antibody is an extraction of (usually rabbit) blood from an
animal that has been insulted with the agent you'd like to detect. The
extraction is enriched for antibodies. They are less reliable, because there
could also be other antibodies in there. Even the antibodies that recognize
what you're looking for could be a population of antibodies, each recognizing
a different part (think the blind men and the elephant parable). Presumably,
you have tested that a positive control of what you're trying to look for
works.

A monoclonal is different. You insult a mouse with a sample of what you'd like
to detect, and then resect the spleen, which contains b-cells, cells that
produce the antibody. You then fuse the b-cells with a special strain of
cancer cell that will immortalize the b-cell (these are called 'hybridomas').
After sorting one cell to a well, you then test to see if the cells in the
well have produced an antibody that detects what you're looking for.
Therefore, you can be confident that a monoclonal antibody contains only one
antibody, that recognizes only one antigen.

You don't necessarily know what the antigen is that is recognized (that's
called the epitope). The epitope could be, say, a piece of protein on the
outside of the fungus or a different piece of protein on the outside of the
fungus. It's even conceivable that even for a monoclonal there are side-
reactions against things that are naturally in the sample.

And: Epitope retrieval techniques are really complicated. So figuring out
exactly what epitope is recognized is not trivial.

~~~
nonbel
>"you can be confident that a monoclonal antibody contains only one antibody,
that recognizes only one antigen"

Not sure if you really meant that since it is kind of contradicted by some
later statements, but all antibodies are promiscuous. Thinking you can map one
antibody to one epitope is extremely dangerous. It is a matter of quantity
(affinity/avidity), not quality.

~~~
twic
Exactly. When i did immunocytochemistry, i had more confidence in polyclonals
than monoclonals. If you get a strong signal with a polyclonal, then you know
that many different antibodies are all binding the same thing, so it's very
likely it's your protein. If you get a strong signal with a monoclonal, that's
just one antibody - so it might be your protein, or it might be some other
protein that, by chance, your antibody happens to bind tightly.

------
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. Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence, and this wouldn't even motivate me to perform
a follow up study.

~~~
pcwalton
I'm curious: how does something this obviously flawed get through peer review
for Nature?

(I believe you that this is bad science.)

Edit: I answered my own question here:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports)
(Summary: It's not Nature; it's a "megajournal" affiliated with it with
apparently much lower editorial standards.)

~~~
nextos
Exactly. Scientific Reports (and Nature Communications) is sometimes used for
papers that don't get into Nature or any of its siblings (Genetics, Methods,
Protocols, Biotechnology).

~~~
adrianN
Can confirm. Had a paper rejected by Nature with the suggestion to send it to
Scientific Reports instead. Scientific Reports accepted it.

------
Uptrenda
It's hard not to exaggerate the implications of this study if fungal infection
does turn out to be the cause of AD given how huge this would be for humanity.
Just off the top of my head I can say this disease has effected my family (1
set of grandparents effected by this disease so far) so I'd like for the
conclusion to be correct.

I guess the next step would be testing the hypothesis with more people with AD
to see if it holds up and then somehow getting approval to do drug trials (and
I'm sure there will be no shortage of volunteers.) I can almost see a
clamouring of families trying to get their hands on anti-fungal drugs in the
future in the hope that it helps their loved ones but we simply won't know if
this will help until there's more data.

Hoping for a break through. It's certainly not without precedent that we find
something extremely simple / obvious that turns out to be the key. On a side
note: it's interesting to think that the crack pots you see writing about
candidas infections being the cause of numerous hard-to-treat illnesses
-might- actually be right (in a sense.)

~~~
chetanahuja
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. Add to
that the blood-brain barrier which makes it very hard to treat any type of
infection in the brain.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier#Fu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier#Function)

Combination of these two factors sadly means that short of major breakthroughs
in fungal antibiotic research or in drug delivery to the brain, Alzheimer is
not likely to suddenly become more treatable even if the fungal infection
theory proves to be true.

~~~
kevinalexbrown
First, there are antifungal drugs that pass the BBB, with varying efficacy:

[https://www.medicine.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/domfiles/i...](https://www.medicine.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/domfiles/infectiousdisease/EMT030408.pdf)

Second, antifungals have positively affected AD-like symptoms, though possibly
through misdiagnosis.

~~~
et2o
It's known to be pretty difficult to treat a lot of fungal infections in the
CNS. The agents we have are pretty nasty, with severe side effects.

~~~
solofounder7
I'm a hacker not a doctor but I've done some research into water purification,
and here is what I've learned:

The body is mostly water. The task of removing microorganisms and fungus from
water has been well studied.

Science knows of effective agents which are proven to purify water of micro-
organisms like bacteria and also fungus. Some of these are being utilized in
public water decontamination, and others while also effective are not used
because they are less cost efficient to produce.

Water purifying agents have a varying range of effectiveness and also and a
varying range of toxicity to the human body. There are a couple of agents in
particular however which are both well tolerated by the body and are also
remarkably effective at decontaminating water.

The one which my research indicates leads the pack in this area is a white
crystalline salt named Potassium Iodide, KI. KI has been used widely by both
the military and by campers in portable water decontamination.

A solution of Potassium Iodide in water (known colloquially as Iodine) was a
leading and apparently very effective drug during the 19th century in the
United States. There are doctors today who prescribe milligram doses of KI
(many many times more than the RDA) to treat a wide array of ailments but
especially in dermatology. They do not typically see serious side effects
although they do frequently recommend monitoring thyroid levels while
utilizing higher doses.

~~~
manarth
This argument seems to be that "The body is mostly water. The task of removing
X from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove X from the
body". This seems to be a logical fallacy.

Let me rephrase this argument as: "The body is mostly water. The task of
removing HIV from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove
HIV from the body".

Just to be clear: I have no medical expertise, this is mere conjecture. But
fungal infections could perhaps persist in various cells. In neurons. In spoor
form. In all sorts of manifestations, where they wouldn't be affected by the
same treatment that disinfects water. I don't have any expertise to say one
way or the other, but I suspect that if there were a simple solution such as
"just treat with Iodine, it'll kill the fungus", this discussion wouldn't be
taking place.

~~~
kibibu
A quick injection of Easy Off Bam! Mould Killer should fix 'em right up.

------
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...

Amyloids have generic secondary structure (can be created from any amino acid
sequence under the right conditions) and yeast produce amyloids. They quite
possibly raised antibodies towards yeast amyloids and then stained human
amyloids. It is strange they do not report staining these brains for amyloid-
Beta, it is an obvious thing to do.

~~~
jschwartzi
Do the amyloid proteins you'd expect concentrate in similarly-shaped
groupings? One claim is that the shape of the stains has fungal morphology. If
Amyloid-beta concentrations can have fungal morphology then I would think that
might strengthen your claim and weaken the paper's. I'm only an engineer
though, so feel free to dismiss me as ignorant of your field. Either way I can
see how these findings are not terribly interesting.

~~~
nonbel
>"One claim is that the shape of the stains has fungal morphology. If Amyloid-
beta concentrations can have fungal morphology then I would think that might
strengthen your claim and weaken the paper's."

The evidence in the paper consists of a few representative pictures. I have
never seen human brain stained for amyloid-beta, but if it stained at all I
would bet lots of money that I could find at least one clump with "fungal
morphology".

Also, ruling out the other explanations (such as they stained for amyloid) is
not the audience's job, it is their job. They are the ones with access to the
most detailed information, putting them in the best position to think about
various explanations for what could be going on.

------
tim333
I was thinking if this is real then there must have been past cases of people
with Alzheimer’s having been given antifungals for other reasons and having
gotten better. Googling randomly I came across one, sadly paywalled but from
the abstract the guy had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's for three years, then
they figured it was cryptococcal meningitis and gave antifungals and four
months later he was normal.

The interpretation in the paper was it was a misdiagnosis rather than an
Alzheimer's cure but you never know.

[http://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-
alzheimers-d...](http://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-
disease/jad00985)

~~~
Geeek
Here you go
[http://www.docdroid.net/PBdotNO/contentserver.pdf.html](http://www.docdroid.net/PBdotNO/contentserver.pdf.html)

~~~
tim333
Thanks

------
modeless
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.

~~~
3327
Perhaps but the discovery is still significant. Until now there was no such
correlation with Alzeimher's and Fungi.

This has significant implications in terms of direction of future research.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Until now there was no such correlation with Alzeimher's and Fungi.

The point of the criticism seems to be that with an improper control group,
there still isn't such a correlation, just a suggestion of a possibility of a
correlation. But it might be a correlation between, e.g., _age_ and fungal
infection.

That's why, but for the variables under study, you want your control group to
look as much like your experimental group as possible.

~~~
Dylan16807
That's not how correlations work.

~~~
calinet6
That is how correlations may _not_ work, though.

------
derefr
Another recent discovery, that of the existence of a meningeal lymphatic
system, makes this finding all the more interesting. As far as I know, fungus
is in the set of foreign bodies that the adaptive immune system does the least
about. Instead, the body mostly removes fungus by mechanical lymphatic
clearance.

------
dluan
So, turns out there's many types of fungus that affect behavior, and there are
even a few that create entirely new behaviors. One such example is ants, when
infected by a type of fungus, will climb high and latch onto a branch by
biting hard into it. This is so that the ant will get eaten by birds, which
then complete the life cycle of that fungus.

There's not many well understood systems (the other well-studied one is
toxoplasmosis and cats), but one researcher on Experiment, Charissa de Bekker,
just released a new paper with findings from her project.

The results gave a first clue about the many genes that are involved in this
manipulated biting behavior. For instance, that the fungus is likely producing
LSD-like compounds and is secreting proteins that could affect serotonin and
dopamine levels in the brain, as well as the ant’s ability to communicate
through chemosignals with their nest mates. As well, in the paper, they
release the entire transcriptome taken from the brains of these ants, giving
other scientists a chance to use this as a model system and to begin to target
which genes go on to influence behavior.

I was just talking to her about it this week, and so this news is very timely
and a bit eerie. But very cool.

[http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/s12864-015-1812-x.p...](http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/s12864-015-1812-x.pdf)

------
CCs
If it turns out to be the cause too (maybe similar to cervical cancer), it's a
huge discovery.

Asimov's book on science history is an interesting read, full with similar
discoveries that were ignored for many years.

[http://www.amazon.com/Far-Human-Eye-Could-
See/dp/155817107X](http://www.amazon.com/Far-Human-Eye-Could-
See/dp/155817107X)

------
n0us
I wonder how many mental illnesses are the result of imbalances in foreign
organic matter/microbes/fungi/dietary issues and not issues fundamental to the
brain itself?

~~~
kawera
An old but interesting article and discussion related to your question:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/how-
your-c...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/1969/12/how-your-cat-is-
making-you-crazy/8873/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3573694)

Articles somehow related to the subject:

[http://www.nature.com/news/the-tantalizing-links-between-
gut...](http://www.nature.com/news/the-tantalizing-links-between-gut-microbes-
and-the-brain-1.18557)

[http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/do-gut-bacteria-
rule-...](http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/do-gut-bacteria-rule-our-
minds)

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-
brain/](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/)

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/21/4595712/gut-feelings-
the-f...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/21/4595712/gut-feelings-the-future-
of-psychiatry-may-be-inside-your-stomach)

[http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/changing-gut-
bacteria-t...](http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/changing-gut-bacteria-
through-245617.aspx)

~~~
n0us
Thanks for all of the sources. I remember listening to a talk on NPR about the
same subject a while back in my car but I couldn't find a link to it.

~~~
kawera
Maybe this: [http://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2012/07/02/15614221...](http://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2012/07/02/156142214/a-parasite-carried-by-cats-could-hurt-humans-
sanity)

------
tim333
>Therefore, 100% of the AD patients analysed thus far by our laboratory
present fungal cells and fungal material in brain sections.

>No fungal material was observed in brain tissue from ten control individuals,
whereas fungal infection was clearly present in brains from ten additional AD
patients.

So 100% correlation so far - pretty impressive results.

I wonder about my dad who has an unexplained Parkinson's like nervous
deterioration.

------
wilder
"Different brain regions including external frontal cortex, cerebellar
hemisphere, entorhinal cortex/hippocampus and choroid plexus contain fungal
material, which is absent in brain tissue from control individuals. Analysis
of brain sections from ten additional AD patients reveals that all are
infected with fungi."

------
narrator
Methylene Blue has shown promise as an alzheimer's treatment. It's a potent
antifungal. It easily diffuses through the blood brain barrier. It also
happens to be cheap and unpatentable.

------
rajacombinator
Wow sounds like a major breakthrough. How did they not notice this before?

~~~
CamperBob2
They still haven't decided for sure if dietary cholesterol is bad for you, or
salt for that matter.

The best minds of our generation are too busy selling ads to be bothered with
trivial stuff like this.

~~~
rajacombinator
As someone busy working on selling ads, I can't tell whether I should
appreciate or resent this comment...

~~~
beatpanda
You should quit.

------
carbocation
If Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is caused by fungal infection, why have
antifungals (often given for people with invasive fungal disease) never cured
an AD patient? AD is common enough that many of these people will have
received antifungals for e.g. esophageal thrush or even fungemia.

Regarding the research, the data presented here are not convincing without
larger scale replication with better controls and more standardized assays.

~~~
tankenmate
One possible reason I can think of is that the immune system in the brain is
somewhat different from the rest of the body; not quite on par with say the
mammary glands, testes, or eyes. Obviously I am not a doctor etc, anti biotics
etc can have reduced effect in body parts that have reduced or modified immune
responses; maybe anti fungals are similar?

~~~
carbocation
It is true that medication penetration of the blood-brain barrier and delivery
to the brain is different from other organs (each organ has unique
characteristics in this regard).

But we do treat people with CNS infections routinely, including CNS fungal
infections.

------
dacompton
There was recent speculation that alzheimer's was transmissible (prion thing).
The transmissibility would make sense if it were actually the fungi causing
the build up of the proteins and other damage.

~~~
rmtew
From what I recall, the results in a study showed that the primary care giver
of an alzheimer's patient was more likely to get alzheimer's themselves. The
argument against transmissibility was that primary care givers tend to be
related to the patient.. therefore the more likely reason for caregiver
alzheimer's is genetics.

~~~
thawkins
Or as primary care giver they are exposed to the same environmental factors
the sufferer is exposed to, but are generaly younger so more resistant until
later life.

------
erikreinertsen
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.

I am a biomedical data scientist, not a neuroimmunologist, so I asked a
colleague in my MD/PhD program who has experience in the latter field. His
thoughts:

"There are a number of concerning issues here:

1) They are using polyclonal antibodies. I don't think they addressed
possibility of cross-reactivity. Comparing Alzheimer's disease vs control
brain is like comparing apples and oranges. There can be very different
inflammatory states between the two and yield different antigenic
environments.

2) The possibility that neurofibrillary tangles or amyloid plaques are sticky
and can non-specifically bind antibodies remains a possibility.

3) Only immunohistochemistry? Could have at least done some qPCR especially
since they can grow these fungi for quantiation. The only other paper that
observed fungus in CNS of AD patients is by the same group. The high
possibility of artifact is has not been ruled out."

*edited grammatical typo

------
mschuster91
Interesting. Does this mean that a treatment with fungicides may stop/prevent
AD onset or progress?

~~~
msandford
Depends on which way the arrow of causality points. If AD makes the brain
vulnerable to fungal infection, probably not. But if fungal infection causes
AD, then it seems likely.

This might be a giant breakthrough, or it might be just a side effect. The
uncertainty is not fun at all. But if the arrow points the right way, then yes
it's possible that antifungals would be a big part of treatment.

~~~
x5n1
In either case it makes a lot of sense to start dosing patients with anti-
fungal medication and see if their symptoms improve. Usually you do not give
fungicide to patients because it has a lot of side-effects but those drugs are
readily available and easily prescribed.

~~~
pygy_
Not sure why you got downvoted. It would have to be done in double blind
trials vs placebo, but it would be a great way to test the causal link between
fungi and symptoms. You'd have to make sure the fungicides cross the blood
brain barrier in patients.

~~~
protomyth
Haven't we studied the effects of Alzheimers enough not to need the control
group? I worked in clinical trials and one study still haunts me knowing what
happened to the control group.

~~~
nonbel
Sure, it fits right in with the plan to get rid of those pesky controls when
testing painkillers too: "Drug companies have a problem: they are finding it
ever harder to get painkillers through clinical trials. But this isn't
necessarily because the drugs are getting worse. An extensive analysis of
trial data1 has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger
over time, making it harder to prove a drug’s advantage over placebo. [...]
For companies trying to develop treatments, one remedy might be to compare new
drugs against their best competitors instead of against placebo — or to go
back to conducting smaller, shorter trials."
[http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-
thwarts-p...](http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-
painkiller-trials-1.18511)

~~~
zaroth
Comparing old vs new is how it's done in cancer research. It's inhumane to
prescribe placebo to someone in serious pain. You give them the old or the
new, and they report how they felt.

In this case, since there is no concept of old or new, it's an entirely new
class of treatment. So you give the current best-practice treatment without
anti-fungal, and you give the same with anti-fungal.

Anyone in the study is agreeing at the onset that they have a 50/50 chance
they will either get the current best practice, or the exact same thing but
also the anti-fungal. These are volunteers who are helping move the anti-
fungal research forward for everyone, in exchange for a chance of getting
early access. They can also leave the study at any time after starting, but if
they are in the anti-fungal group they would lose access to it if they did.

If that's not enough, there are cases (e.g. in cancer research) of de-blinding
the study when there's a clear/strong positive effect and providing early
access to all enrolled if it becomes obvious the new treatment is widely
beneficial.

So I think we have the theory behind the ethics fairly well wrapped on how to
roll out these drugs. I don't think in practice it works so well, the studies
are often poorly run and poorly administered making them extremely more costly
than they should be.

~~~
protomyth
The place where I worked did a pretty good job at administering the studies.
The cost was in all the sampling and shipping. When your study is doing 1,000
sample kits with 5 samples every week day for multiple years, its going to
cost.

I am still a bit clueless with all the research we have done with Alzheimer's
why we need another control group?

~~~
toast0
The control group, with double blinds, provides evidence that the change in
treatment causes the change in outcome. If you test without a control, the
change in outcome could be a result of any other changes between the test
protocol and previous control groups.

You might be able to do a small study without a control to test feasibility of
the hypothesis, but I don't know if that would pass ethics review; would
probably depend on the side effects of the anti-fungal. Another less invasive
way would be to test for fungal presence in groups with and without the
disease, likely through autopsies, since sampling a live brain seems
intrusive.

~~~
protomyth
Here's my problem, we know the outcome of Alzheimer's, surly we have the data
to go ahead without a control group? We've had them before.

~~~
toast0
Without the control group, you don't know if the change you think you made is
the change that made a difference.

~~~
protomyth
Ok, but don't we have a body of knowledge on Alzheimer's that having another
control group is redundant? Why do we keep needing new control groups for
things that are going to kill people and we know are going to kill people? I
cannot get by the ethical problem of knowing we're kill 50% of the people in
the study to provide data we already have.

~~~
toast0
The problem is, if something related to how you run your test of the anti-
fungal has an effect on the disease, you're going to assume its the anti-
fungal; but maybe it's not. If you have a control group, and both groups do
better than expected (compared to the body of evidence), then you've learned
something you wouldn't have without a control group (and you'll have to work
hard to figure out what changed in this study vs other studies). If anti-
fungals are a clear winner, it's likely that the study protocol would be
changed to give everyone the drug after early results.

------
zmmmmm
This seems like potentially an incredibly important breakthrough with a
perplexingly weird title. _Different_ brain regions? Different to what? From
reading the study, the novelty is not about the "difference" of the brain
regions, but the fact that fungal infection is found in AD patients at all.
The controls had _no_ infection, not _different_ infections in their brains.

I'm curious if the title makes sense to people in the field or is this weird
to them too?

~~~
soneca
As a layman, i understood the title correctly I guess. That there were fungi
not just on one spot, but different (ie several) regions.

~~~
Myrmornis
But that would be bad English. I wouldn't expect the Nature editors to let
such bad English slip through in an important title, but I admit it is
frustratingly common to see people not caring too much about that sort of
thing.

I had the same concern as GP. I don't understand the title; the controls seem
not to have fungi in their brain, which had always been my assumption about,
for example, my brain.

~~~
zmmmmm
After reflecting I am wondering if this is a result of the natural tendency of
scientists to avoid any hint of overstating their work. Were the fungal
infections all in the same region or by the same fungus it'd be absolutely
shocking. It'd be a "cold fusion" level revolution for the field - and a "cold
fusion" level embarrassment for them if they are wrong. So they are extremely
keen to put up front that the picture is not nearly so clear as that.

There is also a tendency when scientists are extremely confident they have
found something incredibly important to understate it. I always think of the
Watson and Crick "It has not escaped our notice ..." statement in this
context.

This is all based on guesswork though, so that's why I'm curious about what
people in the field think.

------
sea2summit
I just moved out of a place I'd lived for 5 years that turned out to have
black mold. I've had weird digestive issues and my immune system has gone to
shit since living there but I wasn't aware of the mold problem and didn't know
of the health problems it could cause. So this study is pretty terrifying; I
should probably get tested.

------
bitL
Is there any relation to the study that suggested AD is diabetes type 3?
Insulin resistance + fungi?

~~~
carey
Candida is a common opportunistic infection in diabetes type 2, so there's a
few ways in which correlations could be observed. The fungal infection could
be a symptom of the underlying "type 3" diabetetes; or the CNS fungal
infections could be more common in diabetic or pre-diabetic people, leading to
AD.

------
captainill
If you've ever taken antibiotics for an extended period and ended up with a
fungal infection due to the loss commensal bacteria this is pretty intriguing.
There is a lot of new literature proposing links between gut disruption and
neurodegenerative disease.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe antibiotics cause Alzheimer's.

------
fasteo
For what it's worth, the institution [1] behind this study is one of the most
prestigious scientific institutions here in Spain.

[1] [http://www.cbm.uam.es/](http://www.cbm.uam.es/)

------
rwmj
Are there other internal diseases caused by fungus? Obviously there are fungal
skin infections, but it sounds strange that a fungus would be able to live
inside the body.

------
nonbel
Nature is not a good scientific journal. The good info will be found in highly
specialized journals. The amount of BS in scientific journals is related to
prestige like this:

x=seq(0,1,by=.01);

plot(x,dbeta(x,.5,.5), xlab="Prestige", ylab="BS")

~~~
TeMPOraL
For those without a R interpreter handy, Emacs to the rescue:

    
    
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           |  |                                                                           |  
           |  |                                                                           |  
           |  |                                                                           |  
           |  \                                                                           /  
           |   |                                                                         |   
           |   \                                                                         /   
           |    |                                                                       |    
           |    \                                                                       /    
           |     \                                                                     /     
           |      \                                                                   /      
        B  |       \                                                                 /       
        S  |        \                                                               /        
           |         -\                                                           /-         
           |           \                                                         /           
           |            -\                                                     /-            
           |              -\                                                 /-              
           |                --\                                           /--                
           |                   --\                                     /--                   
           |                      ---\                             /---                      
           |                          -----\                 /-----                          
           |                                -----------------                                
           |                                                                                 
           +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
                                                Prestige
    

(Also an on-line R interpreter:
[http://www.r-fiddle.org/.](http://www.r-fiddle.org/.))

~~~
sooheon
What package(s) did you use to create this?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I used [http://r-fiddle.org](http://r-fiddle.org) to verify what was the
intended function, then used built-in Artist Mode (M-x artist-mode) to draw an
ellipse for function and square for axes, and finally cut it down in
fundamental-mode and added labels. It's basically vanilla Emacs, but I admit
to using multiple-cursors.el for some cleanup. It's an excellent addon mode
offering a more interactive way to do some things you'd otherwise do via
keyboard macros. Check out [0] and [1].

[0] - [https://github.com/magnars/multiple-
cursors.el](https://github.com/magnars/multiple-cursors.el)

[1] - [http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html](http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html)

~~~
sooheon
Ah thanks, I was aware of artist-mode, I thought there was some ESS like
package that could output ascii graphs of functions :) R-fiddle is new to me
though, thanks for that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's also orgtbl-ascii-plot[0], there was a mode for writing out flow
diagrams in Emacs that used a web backend to render them (I don't remember the
name), and I'm pretty sure you could abuse some graphics-to-ascii or DOT file
command line tools to get the required result in Emacs buffer - particularly
via org-babel, which lets you invoke external programs to "evaluate" code
blocks. I remember using some Java-based local tool to render graphs through
org-babel, but again I don't recall the name or URL.

[0] - [http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/orgtbl-ascii-
plot.html](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/orgtbl-ascii-plot.html)

------
ommunist
This is extraordinary. It means antifungal drugs like Fluconazole can possibly
prevent AD.

~~~
seesomesense
No, it means that a researcher doing fourth rate science has successfully
trolled HN.

~~~
dang
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

------
seesomesense
Sounds like Bozo the Clown is now publishing articles in Nature.

One problem with biomedical research is the crackpots.

------
pmoriarty
Are these fungi from Yuggoth?

