dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37931424

Actually not a dupe: the link above is a press release, whereas the more recent link: https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/b... is a corrected proof of the actual scientific paper summarized in the press release.

Those are dupes by HN dupetheory.

Just added HN dupetheory to my lexicon. Love it.

Yes, the criterion we apply is "is this substantially the same story", and/or (more or less the same thing) "can this lead to a substantially different discussion" than the previous thread.

This one is substantially the same story, hence it's treated as a dupe, even though of course it's not the same article.

Press release = Corrected paper proof?

Ok.....

That's not the equation. It's something more like: "HN discussion of corrected paper proof is unlikely to be sufficiently different from HN discussion of earlier release on same work".

Fair enough

Comments moved thither. Thanks!

It seems like they killed the gut bacteria with antibiotics, then transferred the bacteria from alzheimer's patients, causing symptoms.

I wonder if a second gut transplant from non-alzheimer's patients would reverse it?

I think that once you start having symptoms that it's too late because the bacteria has already spread outside your gut and at that point it'll be too difficult to put it back in check, it's passed the threshold

Do we know which bacteria/microbiota is causing this? Any benefits from taking probiotics?

I believe there’s some benefit from boulardi yeast but I don’t know the reference except that it’s part of the bredeson protocol. Smells nice in a cleaning vinegar solution though.

Do you but I dunno if asking HN for advice on Alzheimer's prevention is the move

The article mentions:

  In addition, similar to a previous report using a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,56 the relative abundance of the pathobiont genera Desulfovibrio was significantly increased in Alzheimer’s patients compared to cognitively healthy control subjects

Holy crap. We really don't know anything, do we.

If you look at the scatter graphs, it's not terribly impressive. Lots of overlap, and most of the results show no difference. The one that does show a large difference still has a lot of overlap in the scatter graph, and it seems to be some outliers that bring down the mean value.

It's kind of an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. This isn't that.

What interests me more is why HN users keep posting this study, and voting it to the top of the home page.

almost everyone on HN is interested in biology and especially biohacking but does not actually realise they have none of the necessary expertise to judge claims coming from that field; the level of discourse on these topics is sometimes worse than what I spot on reddit

Pish Posh! My understanding of C pointers makes me one of the smartest people in the world! Why else would I have cleared the hurdle at $COMPANY during a tremendous bull market!

Clearly I can learn any discipline by mucking about for a few afternoons. What is a billion years of natural selection to my towering intellect?

Lots of people said this about SpaceX and Tesla. Besides, our towering intellect did destroy millions of years of Small Pox evolution.

Turns out some people are smart. Other people who do the same thing are stupid but it isn't a marker.

Yes, when a topic you're intimately familiar with comes up, it's unbearable reading the comments.

Worst part is when you try to set the record straight and wind up with -5 votes and a dead comment within minutes.

To be lovingly snarky: HN in aggregate is incredibly skeptical of academic research, claiming reproducibility crises everywhere, misalignment of incentives, brutal working environments whose results can't be trusted, only in mice, etc.

Unless it either confirms their existing beliefs, or is so technical that they don't understand it. Then the research must be ok :)

Not really weighing in one way or another, but I do not see scatter plots in the paper other than one PCA plot (which was not LDA... not sure why they chose PCA, so no strong reason to expect point separation there, though I do not know the diversity metric they are using so feel free to ignore my commentary).

Violin plots always look like they overlap. I think seaborn's split=True should be pushed a bit harder.

Figure 3 is the one showing the cognitive results.

This field is littered with studies like this, measuring hundreds of different outcomes and then presenting the statistical noise as positive findings.

I concur; the graphs didn't show much difference to me (but I was on my phone so I couldn't be certain :-) The study seems impressive from the title, but reading it not so much. The Alzheimer's patients in the study are older, more male, and less educated than the controls, so it seems quite likely that they are eating worse which would explain the different microbiota. This could mess up the mice in multiple ways. (Seriously, the mice that receive Alzheimer's microbiota could have a stomach ache and do slightly worse on the tests.)

As for why there is so much interest on HN, I've noticed that Alzheimer's is one of the topics that is overly popular on HN, along with category theory, Lisp, and problems with Tesla, to name a few.

I wonder if simply taking antibiotics at some point, clearing everything out and repopulating the flora could help?

My guess is no - that something in the system is triggered by the fecal transplant but that gut flora isn't the main source, but it would be an interesting thing to look at. I'm not in this field and do not know how to mine this data or properly posit the question, but maybe something along the lines of: "How many people who have taken a strong antibiotic in the last 10 years get alzheimer's vs people who have not taken any antibiotics?" Seems like this data should be out there, right?

Maybe someone who works with this kind of data or research can weigh in. Can you imagine if the cure is that simple? Just take strong antibiotics at an early stage....!?!

N=1. I had various digestion problems, probably due to gut flora imbalances. After several years of trying to fix the problem with diet changes suggested by my doctor (more fiber), I traveled abroad and came home with a very nasty food borne illness.

After one Z-pack and several days of being "backed up", my gut was suddenly back to normal and has been fine since.

Rebooting fixes so many problems.

Just don't reboot every year, or multiple times per year.

You can cause worse issues than you started with!

Can you explain Z pack and backed up?

"Z-pak" is a dosage of the antibiotic Zithromax, or Azithromycin, taken as a "pack" of pills over the course of 5 or more days.

I'm guessing backed up means constipated

Fecal transplants are used to repopulate the gut of someone when necessary - for example after strong antibiotics! You can use flora of someone living in your household, as you probably share a lot of flora by being in the same environement and sharing food.

Edit0: Not "you can use" as in "do this at home" but in the sense of "it's an option your healthcare provider might offer. I worded it odd.

C Diff was in a recent Southpark Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENEBRFOVuXI

The spice must flow.

> I wonder if simply taking antibiotics at some point, clearing everything out and repopulating the flora could help?

For some GI issues, this is actually a real solution used today. I learned about it from a SIBO diagnosis, which is treated with antibiotics and dietary changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_intestinal_bacterial_ove...

I wish it were that easy. I've had sibo for 3 years now, originally methane sibo, took 2 rounds of xifaxan and neomycin and 3 rounds of xifaxan alone and now still have hydrogen sibo. I've tried many other herbal treatments, done a ton of tests, tried probiotic loading to overcome it, but nothing seems to have really worked. Worst part is eating the same meal, for every meal, day in and day out because it's the only food that doesn't give me issues.

I’m so sorry. I understand a bit of that from going through treatment and I can’t imagine how frustrating/upsetting it must be.

Are shady fecal transplant clinics a thing yet? Take these antibiotics for a week, then we’ll hose fecal matter from healthy, young, thin people into your intestines like a reverse enema. Move over sperm banks and blood banks, the poop bank is much easier. Only sorta joking.

This was an entire episode of South Park last year.

The process hasn't been perfected and is still pretty risky even at official places

You should apply to YC.