Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection

Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by epo on Thursday September 05, 2013 @11:58AM (#6334927)

Headline grabbing from some researchers who are probably trying to preserve their funding.

Some mice were genetically engineered to suffer brain shrinkage, this injection partially reversed that. Downs's syndrome is a genetic abnormality which affects many aspects of the brain and the link to Down's syndrome here is entirely specious. The claim is as idiotic as observing that people sometimes die from incisions, so reversing the effect of an incision by applying a sticking plaster is heralded (with caveats of course) as being a way to reverse death.

Oh, and it is Down's syndrome, named after John Down.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by tokenadult on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:17PM (#6335037)

and it is Down's syndrome, named after John Down.

The preference in the international medical literature is to name syndromes WITHOUT the possessive suffix on the name of the discoverer, partly because languages don't agree on what grammatical ending to use to indicate genitive case. Thus the standard name of this syndrome, for people who don't more descriptively say "trisomy 21," is "Down syndrome," without the apostrophe-s ending.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymously_named_dise...

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by csixty4 on Thursday September 05, 2013 @01:05PM (#6335351)

Same with "Tourette Syndrome". It took a while to get used to, but it makes sense.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by epo on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:27PM (#6335082)

I'm not conversant with the 'international medical literature' so I shall assume you know what you are talking about. However, I don't take wikipedia as an authorative source on anything.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by huherto on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:45PM (#6335187)

I disagree. Wikipedia links are very good, specially for informal discussions like this one.

- The content is readable by most people without having to have specialized knowledge on the subject.

- The content is open and reviewed by multiple people.

- You have links to the references. In this case there is a link to this NIH article. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667526/ But the content is more technical and harder to read for most people.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by epo on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:55PM (#6335267)

I said it wasn't authoritative, I said nothing about readability or openness, neither of which have anything to do with what is under discussion.

I can provide plenty of UK links which refer to Down's syndrome.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by tokenadult on Thursday September 05, 2013 @01:46PM (#6335629)

I'm a Wikipedian, and I'm fully with you in not taking Wikipedia as authoritative about much of anything, because I have seen how the sausage is made at Wikipedia. That said, after a Google search, I saw that the two articles I linked to showed that many medical syndromes are named without a possessive ending on the personal name associated with the syndrome, including Down syndrome, and that was the immediate point at issue.

By the way, I try to light a candle as well as curse the darkness at Wikipedia, by gathering lists of good sources for all the Wikipedians to use,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellig...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...

and by updating articles that have long been tagged as needing improvement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification

I wish that Wikipedia were much better, but the current way to make it better is for people to roll up their sleeves and do something about making it better.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by bargl on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:27PM (#6335086)

> The team at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, in Baltimore, used lab mice that were genetically engineered to have extra copies of about half the genes found on human chromosome 21, leading to Down syndrome-like conditions such as smaller brains and difficulty learning to navigate a maze.

So they are attempting to build DS into mice and then mitigate the damage caused by their "DS like" enhancements to mice. Sounds like the right path to a solution to me.

Catchy title's make the front page. Sure they may have misled the readers a little bit, but if you read the entire article you can typically criticize the title. They definitely could have named it better, but balanced with the content I think it was appropriate.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome. I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the definitive answer on spelling, but it does give them at least some footing for their spelling.

Edit: tokenadult has a much better answer on the spelling than I do, his comment wasn't there when I starter writing this though.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by epo on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:35PM (#6335125)

They did not build DS into mice, they created one of its symptoms which they then reversed, hence my comparison to exaggerating the effects of sticking plasters. The mice did not have anything like DS and claiming this experiment as having anything to do with DS is sensationalist exaggeration, in fact it is borderline dishonest.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by topynate on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:40PM (#6335154)

So what would be required for the mice to have something sufficiently Down's-like? They didn't shrink the brains with toxins or anything, that shrinkage was a natural consequence of duplication of genes, just as it is in human DS.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by epo on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:50PM (#6335229)

Some genes, not all of them. The experiment was about brain shrinkage, not Down's syndrome.

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by vilhelm_s on Thursday September 05, 2013 @01:06PM (#6335360)

The mice are made specifically as an animal model of Down syndrome. See http://dmm.biologists.org/content/4/5/596.full

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Re:Down syndrome reversed in newborn mice with single injection by porso9 on Thursday September 05, 2013 @12:11PM (#6334994)

It's funny because you said Downs's syndrome the first time.

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