I've never heard of this before. Some cursory googling only turns up a sole author publication by Alan MacDonald in Medical Hypotheses and a few news pieces by dodgy organizations like the Spirochaetal Alzheimer's Assocation.
Despite what a lot of people learn in undergrad psych classes, the evidence linking amyloid beta and tau to AD is quite good and getting stronger with every new molecular paper that comes out.
BTW, there doesn't seem to be a correlation between Lyme disease incidence and AD https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24840565
You might see https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2017.00336 as a sample review paper that talks about oral bacteria that are capable of spurring amyloid formation in addition to spirochetes.
Lastly one of the complaints I've heard from someone involved in the cerebrospinal fluid drainage side of Alzheimer's research is that it is really, really hard to fight the amyloid clearance by immunotherapy dominant faction to get any funding or attention for alternatives. They just don't want to hear it.
There was also the case of actor/songwriter Kris Kristofferson being misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's for years. He had Lyme. This is anecdotal of course. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kris-kristofferson-misdiagnosed...
(edit) Thinking about it more, I think the anecdote you mentioned is a bit different from the parent posts. The anecdote is about a misdiagnosis (he only had Lyme, not Alzheimers), while the parent posts are about people actually having both diseases.
1) Develop a drug (or find one to remarket). Find a disease that it treats or invent one.
2) Pump money into advocacy groups devoted to the disease.
3) Find research that supports the use of your drug.
4) The advocacy group spreads awareness of the disease, even if it's made up, and people start asking their doctors to test for it. Some may even receive a diagnosis.
5) Public pressure reaches the FDA, AMA, et al to consider the use of the drug for treatment.
About 100 discontinued clinical trials targeting amyloid beta disagree with you there, https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.194
Sure, but what causes the amyloid beta? Why wouldn't a long-standing syphilis-like bacterial infection in the CNS cause that sort of protein buildup?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4399390/
It's a little shocking to see a "former Alzeheimer's researcher" presume that tau buildup and bacterial infections are mutually exclusive..
That's like saying heart disease can't be caused by arterial scarring because it's caused by plaque buildup.
Recent research shows that lack of sleep increases both amyloid beta and tau. One of them increases after a single bad night. The other takes a few days of too little sleep to start spiking.
There may be other factors, but the research suggests we need to work on sleep hygiene for at risk populations. This is a non drug intervention that I can wholly get behind.
> "Spinal taps showed that the more deep sleep people missed out on, the higher their levels of A-beta in the morning. Tau levels didn’t budge because of just one night of slow-wave sleep disruption, but people whose activity monitors indicated they had slept poorly the week before the test also had higher levels of that protein."
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/just-one-night-poor-slee...
Love your plaque line - although plaque is compensation and amyloid beta and tau are not, or not per se.
The plaques seem almost similar to remnants of an incomplete chemical synthesis. For instance, glutamate is synthesized in the brain and is used as a neurotransmitter.
If a bacterial infection prevented glutamate synthesization (potentially by utilizing some crucial component for it's own propagation), you'd see a build-up of otherwise useful amino acids that would manifest as plaques.
The plaques should hypothetically be cleaned by neuronal autophagy but something could be throwing that off as well.
And if neurotransmitter production is degraded, of course cognition will suffer. You seem similar symptoms in Schizophrenia as well.
Your answer is interesting. For those following I should note that compensation means a curative or attempted curative event (as opposed to a disease event such as bacterial infection.)
As what is probably an aside, neurotransmitter production being actively downregulated as a compensatory mechanism (to lower local metabolism needs) is possible, and an interesting thought (whether my thought or your thought) (just not one that creates a buildup of tau etc.) I haven't encountered any evidence that this is compensatory and not just a downstream effect. Your mileage may vary. The evidence that mental activity reduces disease progression might be taken as disconfirmation of such an hypothesis - except that mental practice could be helping mask the underlying (progress of the) disease by increasing skill/adaptation.
Re schizophrenia, I now think of it as a definition affected by a kind of "publication bias." The underlying disease process (or processes) may have rather random results depending on just what part of the brain is most affected - only when the amygdala is strongly affected is a patient likely to get a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, since this can make them (or make them seem) "a danger of self or others."
Edit: When I had the pleasure of watching Bill Gates do this, it was one of the most impactful moments in my life. When he would question a SME on a topic he came across as knowledgeable as the SME who has dedicated years to the topic. Bill Gates literally will have read all around the topic and his mind operates like a poker player or chess player who is thinking on multiple levels. His questions are probes to see how many levels you are thinking on, and I think it also informs him of other angles. He’s a brilliant guy.
I feel like I could improve how I approach learning things in fields that are completely new to me, or where I'm far from an expert. From everything you have said and that I've read elsewhere, Gates and others at his level seem to have really honed their approach to learning and becoming able to have an informed conversation with an SME.
Example, I’m making this up, but it’s a similar type of question I saw, someone is explaining how their application stores data, he will ask, “are you encrypting it?” Response: yes “how?” Response: using XYZ “why not ZYX?” Response: well, we haven’t thought a lot about that yet Response: “well what’s the impact on the processor when encrypting?” Response: not sure...
The engineer thought he was building a app to do X but Bill Gates is operating at a different level, perhaps he has a theory on the future of hardware, or how he wants to deploy this in developing countries. Or he read a recent paper where researchers highlighted the impact of encryption for this specific type of application that he thinks you missed. If he respects you, he will point you into a certain direction and it’s a peer to peer discussion and sharing of ideas, if he doesn’t...it’s painful to watch.
Thats not to say that Gates isn't extremely intelligent and hardworking, just that his approach isn't necessarily the best. Also, Spolsky's anecdote is from a few decades ago. Gates will have matured a bit since then.
There is actually quite a lot of lyme disease in Northern California. http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7485.html
That’s why we need research. We don’t know if they have a common cause or just a common mechanism of action. They very well could be the same disease; Lyme Disease is not well understood and has been implicated in all sorts of neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.
But the link isn’t quite obvious enough and the potential treatments, which rules out government money; and aren’t considered to be profitable, which rules out commercial money. Good for Gates stepping in here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4019728/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28514-conquistador-br...
In short, they stopped manufacture because the demand was not high enough to defend the lawsuits - even though science was on the side of the vaccine (though this is partially hindsight, it takes years to do good science much less time to file a lawsuit based on a correlation)
There is a new vaccine entering trials now. I hope it works, but only time will tell. (for all I know it may have failed trials - success will take more time, but failure can be quick and I wouldn't always find out)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirochaete
They aren't just limited to the Eastern US.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3295368/ [2012]
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/283/1823/2015... [2016]
It's really hard for a medical layman such as myself to sift through all the science. This source is interesting for the story of its discovery via ethnobotany even if it doesn't end up a smoking gun cause of Alzheimer's or other neurodegenerative diseases.
I doubt there are 400,000 papers worth reading in all of medicine. A major skill in research is understanding what to read, and how carefully.
Prepping to write a review usually involves about 150 articles, for me. About 50 of them just need a cursory look, and the abstract often suffices. Another 80 or so need some more attention; you might be looking for patterns in the methods used, cross-referencing results, figuring out what labs are doing what, tracking authors over time, etc. This is how you understand the state of a field.
The last 20 or so are the bulk of your time. A few are genuinely excellent and will be a highlight of the review. Some are simply solid work that requires a good amount of attention. A fair number are terrible and highly misleading. These are the papers that look okay, but have some flaws that need to be addressed by the field at large. It takes some tact to write about these, but it's usually not too bad.
Finding good authors, especially ones that write good reviews, can get you up to speed in a field in an afternoon. An evening chasing down citations and digging a bit on your own, and you're probably about where Bill was with this. Since Alzheimer's is a pretty big subject requiring familiarity with a variety of topics, I'd give it two weeks.
Very important studies are usually unexpected - that's part of what makes them important so we're verging on a tautology, there. So it's a matter of hindsight, in every field which contemporary articles are in fact "the classics." Your certainty and trust in current authorities broad knowledge and open-mindedness is a product of not knuckling down to read the abstracts of a few hundred thousand unrecommended journal articles - as well as a profound ignorance about the history of medicine.
That history more than suggests that if you want quality>authority (of contemporary publications) you'd better start reading, and reading nearly everything.
400,000 hours = 50,000 days (at eight hours a day) = 208 years (at 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year)
If the abstracts wern't really read and understood, just skimmed, perhaps it would be possible to do in a tenth of the time, so 21 years.
In other words, there's a LOT of dross, but there are real gems lying there unread and uncited, too.
So only one in ten or a hundred articles might take an hour or more.
Average for all but the vital or good articles (after accumulating a good background and vocabularly), when I timed it back then: 100 an hour without losing any significant information. The vital remainder of 100 abstracts viewed took me (more of a guess, now) on average not more than double that amount of time, again; perhaps less time. That varied a lot because I was looking most keenly for overlooked knowledge(studies) and pairs of studies that were significant only once linked. Therefore I sometimes was willing to follow tangents to tangents just in case and could speed up at that point because it was nearly all dross.
Back when I was in university supposedly studying the history and philosphy of science and language, I had to visit medical libraries and use the CD disks from the then-private company Pubmed, and walk back and forth to a large, printed medical encycopedia chained to a pedestal and the desk-sized CD reader Pubmed provided. I don't include that reading as I took no surviving notes and wasn't counting abstracts way back then. Being able to research online when I returned to medical reading a couple of decades later was an immense relief. Switching tabs to get to a medical dictionary isn't nearly as much exercise, but it is a lot faster. Printed medical dictionaries for professionals have a LOT of pages to turn, in addition to the walking.
Also I wonder how a citizen scientist like Gates does a deep dive on this topic a like this. There are 10's of thousands of research papers on the subject[1] and countless books.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCLwauRh2gQ [2] http://archive.sciencewatch.com/ana/st/alz2/journals/