I mentioned Adam Savage's "Scariest [Podcast] Episode Yet" in a different context the other day[0] in which I remember Joe DeRisi[1] saying something along the lines of brain & spinal fluid being "absolutely pristine" when it comes to the presence/absence of a microbiome (in healthy individuals) and that it'd be real problem if there were one.
I'm just a layman but can anyone ELI5 how this can be squared with the OP, specifically with statements like
> It turns out our grey matter is teeming with bacteria, viruses and fungi
I have a genetic partial immunodeficiency (PNP Deficiency) and I constantly get fungal infections. Living in warm, humid climates is a challenge for me.
Reading just the beginning of that article "she experienced chronic pain, digestive problems and a cardiac arrhythmia", well, that is my life. I constantly have minor aspergillosis, and I have some lung nodules from some past fungal infections as well.
Keeping the microbiome under control is all about a healthy immune system.
But since my disorder affected my mental state they just labeled me as a psychiatric case and did not look any further, If anyone here is a doctor, please do not give up on psychiatric patients. Thanks.
Interesting case here:
Aspergillosis of the central nervous system in a previously healthy patient that simulated Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
"He was admitted to the hospital with an occipital headache which he had endured for 2 months. For over 1 and a half months, he had also experienced behavioral disorders and a disruption of higher mental functions. He had retrograde and anterograde amnesia with both echolalia and the presence of visual hallucinations. "
Reminds me a bit of myself. After 2 COVID infections and 3 vaccines, I began experiencing digestive problems, sleep disturbance, fatigue and severe brain fog. I also was often dismissed by the doctors as simply being depressed. But I now know that I have long COVID. The fight against it is still ongoing and you can read about my struggle with it here: https://tunn3l.pro.
I'm currently working with my girlfriend on a sticker campaign to educate people on these illnesses (esp. me/cfs) in order to remove the Stigmatisation that many patients with similar symptoms expierience.
So, something is weird here, just want to invade this thread and ask HN if there should be a change.
I literally have no idea why someone would downvote this comment. But someone did. This does not bother my ego, it bothers my sensibilities.
So, maybe we should not allow downvotes unless someone comments on why they thing the comment is negative. No need to do this for upvotes because there is no need to comment on things you agree with.
Downvoting without commenting leads to suppression without justification which can be bias or outright manipulation.
I think sometimes these are accidental. When using HN on mobile, the up/down widget is so tiny that it's very easy to hit down when you mean to hit up.
From my experience with making comments connecting guy problems to other illnesses, I think the issue is HN hates anecdotal reports and especially when it contradicts "science".
I put that in quotes because we barely study the microbiome as the root cause for many issues (incredibly difficult to isolate variables) and there's constantly reports of academic malfeasance. As time goes on we also see the microbiome is responsible in things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. But after every new discovery if you try to insinuate there's others, people will say "no no, it's just there's nothing else has to do with that"... intil the next discovery that was only found because they decided to actually invest money into researching it.
You have a point, but often it seems that if a comment got a downvote because some rando took exception to it without a good reason; then the crowd will vote it back up fairly soon. And indeed, your comment is not grey at the time of writing. I personally am not a very consistent upvoter unless either a) the comment was amazing or b) it looks unfairly downvoted.
Ha! Thanks! Nice! So I want to add as well, why just can I not down vote someone who makes a comment under mine but I can still up vote them? Why does my down vote not count when in this case?
To me it seems to make HN favor bias instead of new ideas (which may be right or wrong, but without
Looks like they are using molecular methods on post-mortem brains - all sorts of bugs can grow post-mortem and molecular methods can give false-positives as well as detect non-viable microbes, etc. But that's also based on a quick skim / haven't read the full paper yet.
Culturing from CSF in general will depend on the concentration of the microbe, whether they are viable, if antibiotics/antivirals were already initiated pre-collection, whether it's plated on the appropriate media (e.g. a rare microbe that only grows on one specific type of agar plate), etc. Culturing viruses is also hard/many hospital micro labs have moved away from that.
I think this study may suggest that we are failing to detect certain brain infections (and many are notoriously hard to diagnose if you don't catch them in the right window of time). But a brain microbiome sounds far-fetched. We even plate from brain tissue directly at times and aren't growing a bunch of organisms. I'd approach that claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.
plus we have the fact that the brain at night shifts the fluid to the periphery of the blood vessels to clear out the lactate bound NH4 which would impact any microbiome if it exists...
We can take it one step further: There are microbes everywhere in your body, they matter and they do things. When you take them away or fuck with them too much, weird things start happening.
It is I think not a particularly surprising take. But then often it can be valuable to have things that are kind of obvious codified into a paper of some sort so that we no longer have to rely on "but isn't that obvious?" and can instead point to some primary source that actually explains what is true. That way it can be true for everyone, even the people for whom it wasn't already obvious.
The immune systems does nothing by accident. The immune system is always trying to keep the microbiome in balance and the microbiome helps the immune system as well.
Varying intestinal permeability has usually been related to inert compounds. More recently there has been some study on the significance of certain microbe metabolites, but the evidence for any kind of large scale microbial translocation in people that are not very sick (ie septic) is extremely tenuous.
"Key controversies in blood microbiome research are the susceptibility of low-biomass samples to exogenous contamination and undetermined microbial viability from NGS-based microbial profiling"
Just because you can amplify some sporadic bacteria DNA from the blood does not mean that bacteria are hanging out in the blood in a physiologically meaningful way.
A lot of it is frankly junk science in disreputable journals.
Surprised as how such basic stuff gets "discovered" now and then. For all the toot of science, how come it took us that long to realise such a basic (in appearance at least I'm sure) fact ?
Not quite what you asked, but I know of why another really common set of micro organisms wasn’t noticed. Megaviruses, which rival bacteria in size, were only discovered in the last couple of decades. They’re everywhere. But when people would look for viruses they’d do so specifically by sorting matter in samples by size. So effectively by definition a virus would have to be small. We’d been looking at them under microscopes for over a hundred years but assumed they were inert particles.
I'm sure there are many other things still unknown and many things known but may change. Science is about discovery and many new discoveries are made even basic but also complex discoveries. Information known can change when new information is discovered. Science is not carved in stone it's not faith and corrections, updates are welcome part of discovery.
Where are we in the hype cycle regarding microbiome? Would it be feasible to launch a startup that leverages the synergy between AI, the blockchain and gut bacteria? I am serious!
It does feel like every organ system and every disease has at least one research group trying to connect it to the microbiome. It's reminiscent of the hype cycle around oxidative stress and antioxidants 20 uears ago. There was a core of solid science there, but in terms of connecting specific diseases to oxidative stress, it seems like the research community has largely moved on.
> in terms of connecting specific diseases to oxidative stress, it seems like the research community has largely moved on.
As someone who knows someone at UNC Chapel Hill who was researching this starting about 15 years ago, the research community did not move on, the news just stopped talking/hyping about it.
Here is a recent paper:
Oxidative stress: The core pathogenesis and mechanism of Alzheimer's disease
It is fundamentally true that oxidative balance is crucial to health, and that nutrients play a large role in maintaining that balance; Manganese (SOD2) zinc/copper (SOD1/SOD3), Selenium/Riboflavin/Pyridoxine (Glutathione).
Deficiencies will not cause one disease, but many different ones, depending on the persons risk.
I think oxidative balance plays a large role in controlling the microbiome.
Nutrition, oxidative stress and intestinal dysbiosis: Influence of diet on gut microbiota in inflammatory bowel diseases
If you were a nonprofit medical service or a for-profit insurance company, you could do AI analysis of gut microbiome eDNA against electronic health records with potential for significant value if you could get a stool sample every so often.
> Ani Biome uses machine learning models to provide personalized solutions for enhancing gut microbiome function and addressing inflammation, a prevalent factor in age-related chronic ailments.
I'm just a layman but can anyone ELI5 how this can be squared with the OP, specifically with statements like
> It turns out our grey matter is teeming with bacteria, viruses and fungi
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41752034
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_DeRisi