“Although the research focused on a single person, it reverberated through the world of brain science and even got the attention of the (then) acting director of the National Institutes of Health, Lawrence Tabak. “Sometimes careful study of even just one truly remarkable person can lead the way to fascinating discoveries with far-reaching implications,” Tabak wrote in his blog post about the discovery.”
Very cool - they found an extended family in Medellin, Colombia where virtually everyone got early-onset Alzheimer’s. Except for one guy. Studying his genome revealed a variant related to Reelin, and subsequent studies suggest that Reelin is indeed neuroprotective.
> Purified recombinant Reelin was injected bilaterally into the ventricles of wild-type mice. We demonstrate that a single in vivo injection of Reelin increased activation of adaptor protein Disabled-1 and cAMP-response element binding protein after 15 min. These changes correlated with increased dendritic spine density, increased hippocampal CA1 long-term potentiation (LTP), and enhanced performance in associative and spatial learning and memory.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166788/
Published 2011. It's been a while... I wonder what it would take to reach human trials.
Would expect to see research focused on compounds that increase Reelin expression too, in addition to direct supplementation. A mouse study a couple years later showing nicotine increasing Reelin expression: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23385624/
Nicotine has been really interesting for Dementia or Alzheimer's so this checks out. The one study I know that is ongoing is mindstudy.org. It's well tolerated, cheap, and widely available.
Not a Doctor but if I had a loved one at-risk or experiencing age-related cognitive impairment, it's probably worth trying rather than waiting for scientific consensus which may take years and will probably be blocked by the FDA so some pharma company can develop patented neuro-nicotine or whatever.
Huberman has also espoused nicotine's benefits, so before someone reading this runs headfirst into a nicotine addiction, please be aware of the withdrawl symptons.
don't forget high blood pressure
Very interesting. Though nicotine also has a lot of potential side effects that can make it really counterproductive for the health of an elderly person.
Humans have to become mice to advance
That's a funny thought, we experiment on mice, then one day we accidentally create super mice while trying to solve diseases. From that day, it will be the mice who dominate our world.
I welcome our cute new overlords.
When the Yogurt Took Over…
That's the premise of the (newer) Planet of the Apes movies
The Secret of NIMH mentioned. Let's go!
Future mice-kind archaeologists will have a treasure trove of research to dig through
From my layman's understanding, in the US, it is almost impossible to get FDA approval for drugs that "improve" or "enhance" human biology.
The tl;dr is if you invented a drug tomorrow that stopped human aging, you wouldn't be able to get FDA approval to sell it.
This sadly means that research into how to improve human life and potential are very limited.
An alternative explanation is that it may just be super hard to make into a useful pill or convenient injectable, limiting commercial viability! Most drug companies aren't going to dumping $ into a chemical that may cure a disease but has no practical way to get it to the target site!
> From my layman's understanding, in the US, it is almost impossible to get FDA approval for drugs that "improve" or "enhance" human biology.
Drugs must treat disease, and the benefits must outweigh the risks.
With the exception of cosmetic surgery; for some reason Botox's "avoid face wrinkles" somehow outweighs the risk of permanent paralysis.
But this is a treatment for a serious disease, so I'm sure those standards aren't the barrier here.
> Drugs must treat disease, and the benefits must outweigh the risks.
But why? lol
Because our society is rooted in puritanical, old and crude notions of what it means to be human. This makes its way into legislation.
It is one of the reasons I despise the FDA, it is an incredibly narrow-minded institution. If you made a drug that immeasurably improved QoL for 99.99% of users, you still wouldn't be allowed to sell it. The administration sucks.
Botox was not originally developed for wrinkles or approved for wrinkles, and a lot of the ways it gets used today are off-label.
Botox was originally developed by a bacterium because: evolution.
Luckily, it's almost a certainty that a drug that slows down aging or improves cognition will also affect disease processes.
If there's a drug that improves cognition, it will likely get approved for Alzheimer's.
Studies won't be done on long term risks in young adults taking it.
Do you want to take a drug that rewires your brain but has had exactly 0 studies done on what happens to users after 20 years? Alzeimer's drugs don't need 20 year follow up studies because, with the exception of early onset, the patients are, to put it bluntly, dead.
Actually right now Namenda is being used off-label for cognition enhancing properties, and suffers from the exact issue that its impacts on healthy adults is mostly unstudied. (FWIW I had negative cognitive side effects with it to the extent that I had to abandon it, but plenty of people seem to like it!)
If you want to talk even higher risk profiles, there are plenty of substances that may very well increase neural growth if given to children, but there is no way in hell any ethical medical team is going to ever run those studies.
For one thing, we know that plenty of awful diseases are the result of too much activity in the brain. No one wants to be the lead author on a study titled "Boosting IQ by 10 points in adolescents, with only a 20% risk of seizures."
> almost impossible to get FDA approval for drugs that "improve" or "enhance" human biology
What is the rationale for this?
You can only make drugs to treat medical problems of some sort. I think the argument is that the cost/benefit is never positive for drugs that aren't attempting to just bring you back to baseline.
Basically imagine you are perfectly healthy, and you take a drug that has a 99.9% chance of increasing your IQ by 20 points, or a 0.1% chance of reducing your IQ by 5 points.
The FDA would basically say "no way in fucking hell, you don't need the extra IQ points to cure any problem, and there is a risk of brain damage".
Now if that same drug was instead marketed towards helping people with traumatic brain injuries heal, then it could maybe get approval.
There was a petition a few years back to the FDA to change this to allow research into life extending drugs, but AFAIK it didn't go anywhere.
The entire drug research sphere outside of the US is miniscule. Unless you can sell the drug in the US there's very little point to investing in the large scale research needed to truly determine efficacy. Yeah there's some minimal state sponsored stuff outside of the US. BUt it's like comparing Little League to the MLB.
The Chinese government ran a huge research effort to try and determine the genes for intelligence. From what I understand it was a failure, as the genetic causes of intelligence are too spread out and varied to be easily isolated.
I'm pretty sure if the project had succeeded that the Chinese government would have had no moral qualms about gene-engineering a population with an IQ of 130+ and the US would be permanently behind in every field forever after.
If this great science fiction scenario were to come to pass, I’m pretty confident that it wouldn’t be only the FDA that would be pushed to the side.
The impact of a population in an organised, technologically advanced society being one standard deviation of intelligence higher than a strategic rival population … would be immense.
Even if just temporarily boosting intelligence, something like a militarised Flowers for Algernon scenario is pretty terrifying.
There's an assumption here that such drugs will exist. They might not.
We can give a lab mouse any form of cancer and cure it. We can reverse their aging symptoms... yet we've only been able to extend their lifespan by a measly third at best. It's safe to say we're very far away from getting anywhere close to solving aging in humans if we can't even make an immortal mouse despite a century of throwing every possible thing at them without holding back.
This wasn't necessarily an informed opinion.
Note their "layman's opinion" qualification.
I recently spoke with someone in biotechnology who was doing a deep dive on "exercise pills". she told me that it would only be approved if it treated a specific disease, like muscular dystrophy, because the FDA views any potential negative side effect as too risky to approve for healthy people. Long term negative side effects are tolerable in Duchenne muscular dystrophy because those people are going to die without intervention. Once people with DMD show the safety profile it can be evaluated for more conditions.
> if you invented a drug tomorrow that stopped human aging, you wouldn't be able to get FDA approval to sell it.
Due to the chaos it would kick off, I'm assuming. The FDA just needs to ask themselves "What happens if we OK this?" and if the answer is "I have no idea." they withhold approval.
An interesting tangent is Australia’s FDA equivalent -the TGA - make decisions by a single Doctor called The Delegate
This is a single anonymous doctor chosen at random from a pool of qualified doctors usually from a TGA committee
So effectively all that is required is convincing one very powerful secret doctor
For instance this is why we are the first country to allow MDMA/psilocybin research to resume since Nixon sent the field underground
Amazing to think how powerful organisations have odd quirks
Per-decision afaik
I think the rationale is to minimise both committee biases and corporate influence
I think only a handful of people know who The Delegate is at any one time. The Delegate remains anonymous after the decision is made
> What happens if we OK this?" and if the answer is "I have no idea." they withhold approval
lol, withholding it would cause massive riots
The FDA would be wise enough to know a political hot potato when they see one.
If you think the riots would be massive for a ban, imagine the riots if there wasn't worldwide access immediately. Biological immortality is very much a situation where you want to bring enough gum for everyone.
Sure, but treating Alzheimer’s is a big deal.
> The tl;dr is if you invented a drug tomorrow that stopped human aging, you wouldn't be able to get FDA approval to sell it.
It wouldn't matter; you'd still be free to sell it as an unregulated supplement. Medical insurance wouldn't cover that, but who cares?
> It wouldn't matter; you'd still be free to sell it as an unregulated supplement.
Patent protections on supplements are very weak compared to the protections afforded to FDA approved drugs.
That alone limits research into supplements.
Also what counts as a supplement is limited, companies cannot just declare any random drug to be a supplement. Dietary supplements have to have some tenuous connection to being from a natural source. (Though obviously that line gets skirted a lot, such was with DMAA prior to 2013)
> That alone limits research into supplements.
Why is that relevant? In the scenario under discussion, you've already invented the drug.
My thinking as well. I’m fine with the FDA not giving drug approval to a substance as long as they don’t ban it. There are a few drugs I take regularly that are not FDA approved in the US (I.e Moclobemide as there are no approved reversible MAOIs in the US) but I’m still legally allowed to import them and usually it’s pretty cheap.
The almost daily information I'm hearing about Alzheimer's research is reassuring. My wife's grandmother died of it, and her mother is probably in the first 1/4 of its development. Today's gains may be too late to help her, but I'm hoping they will develop into useful treatments before my wife would start developing symptoms.
I'm in a similar boat, Mother, Mother-In-Law, and previously grandparents on both sides suffered from Alzheimer's. Best lead I've come up with is that somehow increasing influx of CSF has a lot of potential. The APOE4 or whatever gene impeded CSF influx, leads to the plaque build up.
I've also seen inulin, and glutathione quite a bit. I had read some about nicotine before as well, but I don't remember reelin specifically.
Cerebrolysin has potential.
But I keep getting back to the CSF influx, and potentially one easy thing that increases CSF influx is sleeping on your side.
Hydration may also be very important. And stay far away from Anticholinergic drugs like diphenhydramine.
HBOT seems like it could also potentially increase CSF influx.
As a hayfever suffer I have often been offered anti-histamines, but have shied away from using them for fear of the long term detrimental effects.
Can you provide any links on the relationship between anti allergy drugs and alzheimer ?
Diphenhydramine is pretty strongly affiliated with cognitive risks (acetaminophen too).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592307/
When I must take an antihistamine, I go with loratadine (and quercetin if I have it)
I noticed my hayfever completely went away when I started TRT
Alzheimer's is a metabolic disease. It's also dubbed "type 3 diabetes" nowadays.
Don't eat carbs, exercise regularly, thus keep your insulin resistance and overall inflammation low and you won't get Alzheimer's.
My mom died of it, and at least one of my brothers worries about it a lot. But it's not typically familial, and my mom's parents both lived to their late 80s without any signs of dementia.
My favourite research is that quality nutrition is what you need, however, this means a whole food, plant based diet. What that means is no animal fats or refined animal fats as these have been blocking arteries since the 1950s, or whenever it was that Ancel Keys did his landmark studies that made saturated fats bad.
I am okay with that.
The keto diet community believe that Ancel Keys was not right and that sugar is the enemy that causes all of the problems, probably including blocked brain arteries. The whole food, plant based diet does not include refined sugar, so, hedge your bets by staying off the animal fats and added sugar. By staying off the sugar, that eliminates processed foods that invariably have refined fats and oils such as palm oil and much else that gets saturated in processing.
Humans have been eating animal fat for millenia. Cutting excess sugar is a good plan though. We would have gotten some from fruits and berries but nothing like the quantities that are included in many foods today.
During the summer humans would have gorged on fruit while it was available, as well as ultimately learning to preserve and store it for later. Today that urge does us injustice in the form of 1200 calorie Starbucks at every corner.
Humans have been getting polio, measles and smallpox for millenia as well. That doesn't make them cures for heart disease, except in the morbid sense.
Just because people in the medieval times and before did it is no reason to presume that it was good for health.
> It is reasonable to assume
It is reasonable to consider such hypotheses, but until you have some evidence it isn't very convincing. It's on about the same low level of intellectual rigor as assuming that "progress" is all wonderful. Neither good-old-days nor progress-is-always-good are valid modes of logical inference.
Take, for instance, the farming-based diet that our ancestors have eaten for millenia. In fact, there is evidence that it was worse than what went before. But there is also evidence that modern diets are healthier (in terms of robust development to biological potential). It isn't all one way or the other.
Here's a reference to a survey article:
Not really. It's reasonable that it didn't kill them before they had children.
There isn't much selection against diseases that affect us after our children have grown, and what little there is (grandmother care effects, say) was likely swamped in most of human history by other causes of mortality.
>Animal fat.
But we ate less and also metabolized it. We are now a sedentary population.
Yes, this is a huge potential source of disease. We definitely didn't evolve to sit at a desk for long periods. (Or to stand at a desk, for that matter.)
Humans have been enslaving other humans for millennia, still individuals and organizations stands and fights for freedom equality.
On the contrary, industrial farming because possible very recently thanks to antibiotics, international logistics (for food and alive livestock) and modern biocides/fertilizer to grow enough crop for feed.
I’m sure modern tribes absolutely gorging themselves on honey is just newly developed behaviour eh.
but perhaps nearly every day when in season.
This is so out of touch, having a healthy diet is obviously going to help reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease, but it is in no way the ultimate cure.
You must be new here. Hackernews has known for some time things that mainstream science has yet to fully understand: namely, that diet dominates as a cause of big-ticket diseases like cancer and dementia, and that Alzheimer's specifically is type 3 diabetes; accordingly, dietary changes, especially fasting and vegan diets, are absolutely 90% cures.
I'm sorry no one got the joke—this website basically just consists of people with high-functioning autism so you probably need a /s on that one
Not sure why the downvotes. Clearly nobody here wants to look after their arteries.
You missed your sarcasm tag
I am just saying to keep off the HFSS, in line with government policy in the UK. Stay off the saturated fats, the salt and the sugar. The arteries should look after themselves with a modest amount of exercise. And yes, the saturated fats means animal products. There is no crank science there, just no junk food.
Citation needed
People fall for this?
Why are you vegans always so pushy?
Not vegan. I just stay off the animal fats, processed food, sugar and salt. That is just being sensible. I believe veganism is ethics first, save the animals. I just don't want to be a vegetable.
Exceptionally off topic but the name seems appropriate and definitely reminds me of a Steely Dan song:
"Are you reelin' in the years?
Stowin' away the time"
The name derives from Reeler mice.
These mice have a mutation in the Reelin gene that causes them to move as if they were dancing a reel!
My dad would really appreciate this crack. ;) Him and I got to see them live together before Walter Becker passed. :\
He and I*
Remove "and I" to figure out whether to use He or Him, and remove "He and" to figure out when to use "& I" or "& me".
Friend, I've walked this path ahead of you. I must warn you that it's lonely and, unfulfilling.
It's destination is not a house party where everyone was waiting for you're arrival.
I would never use an ampersand in either context. I have more style than that.
All seriousness though—this pedant appreciates you giving me an English grammar rule to brush up on. My pronoun work has been strictly en el español of late.
Either form is cromulent as both are historically accurate.
GP is probably thinking of "My dad and me"; not sure how far back it goes but I've certainly heard it quite a bit from native speakers. You might hear someone say, "Him and me, we go way back", but that's slightly different; but "Him and I" mixes the subject/object case, which must be wrong (and I've never heard before).
ETA: I generally don't bother "correcting" the grammar "mistakes" that native speakers make (like "My dad and me did X"); but if I think it's pretty clearly a non-native speaker, I'll correct them, because that's what I would want someone to do for me if I were speaking in their language.
I always hated this because English is not so simple. To my eye, “me and him went to the store” or “him and me went to the store” both sound good to my ear. But “he and I went to the store” sounds slightly weird, and “I and he went to the store” just sounds awful. Which makes me think this rule is bogus, and that when you compose pronouns with “and”, English actually prefers the object case even when in the subject position. If it were as simple as the rule you suggest, the order of the pronouns would not matter. I’ve also heard people say (e.g.) “he did it with X and I” which makes me think “She and I” in the subject position (for example) is more of a prescriptive grammatical virus than actual English.
Great song, with one of the greatest guitar solos ever.
Looks like Reelin has other effects outside the brain, not always positive.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(23)006...
Thank you for sharing that. Under "Reelin Effects", at least two negatives caught my eye:
Coagulation: Reelin promotes thrombus formation.
Atherosclerosis: Reelin promotes inflammation and plaque formation.Check this out https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6667498/
Reelin seems to also decrease obesity and hunger. Sounds like a wonder drug.
I asked ChatGPT which behaviour results in Reelin being present. It's physical exercise, cognitive activities and social interaction. Behaviours that reduce Reelin are stress, drugs and bad nutrition. Maybe it's just correlation.
I'll be pissed off if they cure aging when I'm already 80.
And then if they cure death I guess I'll be pissed off forever.
Luckily we can already start increasing our healthspan with all the recent available research.
It amazes me that we do not have a publicly funded initiative to cure death. It makes me incredibly angry and frustrated at both the general populace and the government.
First, the idiocy of the general populace to not prioritize death as a problem when it will inevitably be one for them, their children, and everyone they know; and second, for the government to waste trillions of dollars on useless initiatives when that could instead be invested in curing an ailment that has plagued every human to ever live.
If we cared as much about curing aging and death as we did about investing in even a single fighter jet program, we may well be there by now.
I feel like I live in a clown world where the average person hems and haws over trivial problems when they are literally about to fucking die.
"Are you Reelin' in the years?"
Steely Dan tried to tell us. We just didn't listen.
I wonder if some countries with loose labs will offer this for a big sums
Amazing science, so much gratitude to the family!
Reelin is transcribed 4 genes away from acetylcholinesterase. And is a core collagen component. No wonder it's tied to Alzheimer's..
I'm not sure how you're getting the 4 genes away thing, I'm seeing like 20-30 genes and more than 2 megabases of distance in between RLN and ACHE. I'd be surprised if they were even in the same topologically associated domain.
Is there some place on the internet that shows this "4 genes away" evidence? I'm imagining that there is some tool that those involved in this work are aware of that I am not.
The UCSC genome browser is the best way to find where genes are mapped to in DNA.
Here's a link that shows ACHE (acetylcholinesterase) and RELN (reelin) in the same view.
https://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTracks?db=hg38&lastVirtMod...
Very cool, thank you!
"Reelin is transcribed 4 genes away from $ENZYME" sounds like it is of the same general category as "Humans share 98% of their DNA with a chimpanzee and 97% of it with a banana" or whatever. Is that me just not understanding it? I would think 4 genes could have huge impact on functionality.
I believe they're using "4 genes away" as a proxy of basepair distance, not similarity. It's all very messy business but it's not unreasonable that transcription promoters for those other genes also promote reelin transcription.
Is this (genes physically close together, but not contiguous, being affected by the same/related promoters) something commonly seen? I'd love to learn more about it if so!
Thank you, this is very interesting!
Fascinating, thank you!
Can you make any future predictions of this type? That could speed up research.
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There has been research that shows that "Reelin supplementation enhances cognitive ability..." - in mice at least.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166788/
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Not very funny. Making fun of people with disease? Show some class here, please.
Depends on your culture. In many places dealing with bad things humorously is preferred to being all stone-faced about them. One of my grandparents has dementia and since nobody can change that, the family generally tries to be light-hearted about it. Sure, it's tough for everyone involved, for those who he doesn't recognize, those who take care of him, and for himself, but there's no need to make it drag you down more than necessary. Imagine you're struggling with some condition that affects your every remaining waking moment and impedes your ability to interact with those around you, and everyone is all stone-faced about it to boot. Humor is a way to make the best out of a bad situation.
Everything has it's time and place of course, but this was one of the least-bad places one could've made that particular joke. Everyone knows dementia sucks, but for now it's an inevitability for many people. There's no need to make it worse by being all doom and gloom about it.
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Having watched what it did to family members, it's hard to me, personally, find any joke about Alzheimer's or dementia funny.
The structure and phrasing work to tickle the part of my mind that enjoys juxtaposition, though, so that was nice at least.
Are there theories of humor that don't boil down to "setup expectation juxtaposed with punchline reality"? If there was ever a grand unified theory of humor, that would be my guess.
How about this one then:
The scientists involved must have been pretty shocked by this discovery. You might say they were... Reelin from the implications.
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal!
zdrangnar said they arent offended so its okay
Intended or not, people do get hurt by it.
We've all got different ways of handling it so the best we can hope for is some mutual compassion and thoughtfulness. One factor in that is to realize that the effect is more relevant than the intention.