Alzheimer’s may have once spread from person to person, but the risk of that happening today is incredibly low
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An article published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine documents what is believed to be the first evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person.
The finding arose from long-term follow up of patients who received human growth hormone (hGH) that was taken from brain tissue of deceased donors.
Preparations of donated hGH were used in medicine to treat a variety of conditions from 1959 onwards – including in Australia from the mid 60s.
The practice stopped in 1985 when it was discovered around 200 patients worldwide who had received these donations went on to develop Creuztfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which causes a rapidly progressive dementia. This is an otherwise extremely rare condition, affecting roughly one person in a million.
What’s CJD got to do with Alzehimer’s?
CJD is caused by prions: infective particles that are neither bacterial or viral, but consist of abnormally folded proteins that can be transmitted from cell to cell.
Other prion diseases include kuru, a dementia seen in New Guinea tribespeople caused by eating human tissue, scrapie (a disease of sheep) and variant CJD or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. This raised public health concerns over the eating of beef products in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
Human growth hormone used to come from donated organs
Human growth hormone (hGH) is produced in the brain by the pituitary gland. Treatments were originally prepared from purified human pituitary tissue.
But because the amount of hGH contained in a single gland is extremely small, any single dose given to any one patient could contain material from around 16,000 donated glands.
An average course of hGH treatment lasts around four years, so the chances of receiving contaminated material – even for a very rare condition such as CJD – became quite high for such people.
hGH is now manufactured synthetically in a laboratory, rather than from human tissue. So this particular mode of CJD transmission is no longer a risk.
National Cancer Institute/Unsplash
What are the latest findings about Alzheimer’s disease?
The Nature Medicine paper provides the first evidence that transmission of Alzheimer’s disease can occur via human-to-human transmission.
The authors examined the outcomes of people who received donated hGH until 1985. They found five such recipients had developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
They considered other explanations for the findings but concluded donated hGH was the likely cause.
Given Alzheimer’s disease is a much more common illness than CJD, the authors presume those who received donated hGH before 1985 may be at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is caused by presence of two abnormally folded proteins: amyloid and tau. There is increasing evidence these proteins spread in the brain in a similar way to prion diseases. So the mode of transmission the authors propose is certainly plausible.
However, given the amyloid protein deposits in the brain at least 20 years before clinical Alzheimer’s disease develops, there is likely to be a considerable time lag before cases that might arise from the receipt of donated hGH become evident.
When was this process used in Australia?
In Australia, donated pituitary material was used from 1967 to 1985 to treat people with short stature and infertility.
More than 2,000 people received such treatment. Four developed CJD, the last case identified in 1991. All four cases were likely linked to a single contaminated batch.
The risks of any other cases of CJD developing now in pituitary material recipients, so long after the occurrence of the last identified case in Australia, are considered to be incredibly small.
Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (defined as occurring before the age of 65) is uncommon, accounting for around 5% of all cases. Below the age of 50 it’s rare and likely to have a genetic contribution.
perfectlab/Shutterstock
The risk is very low – and you can’t ‘catch’ it like a virus
The Nature Medicine paper identified five cases which were diagnosed in people aged 38 to 55. This is more than could be expected by chance, but still very low in comparison to the total number of patients treated worldwide.
Although the long “incubation period” of Alzheimer’s disease may mean more similar cases may be identified in the future, the absolute risk remains very low. The main scientific interest of the article lies in the fact it’s first to demonstrate that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person in a similar way to prion diseases, rather than in any public health risk.
The authors were keen to emphasise, as I will, that Alzheimer’s cannot be contracted via contact with or providing care to people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Steve Macfarlane, Head of Clinical Services, Dementia Support Australia, & Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Thinner Leaner Stronger – by Michael Matthews
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First, the elephant in the training room: this book does assume that you want to be thinner, leaner, and stronger. This is the companion book, written for women, to “Bigger, Stronger, Leaner”, which was written for men. Statistically, these assumptions are reasonable, even if the generalizations are imperfect. Also, this reviewer has a gripe with anything selling “thinner”. Leaner was already sufficient, and “stronger” is the key element here, so “thinner” is just marketing, and marketing something that’s often not unhealthy, to sell a book that’s actually full of good advice for building a healthy body.
In other words: don’t judge a book by the cover, however eyeroll-worthy it may be.
The book is broadly aimed at middle-aged readers, but boasts equal worth for young and old alike. If there’s something Matthews knows how to do well in his writing, it’s hedging his bets.
As for what’s in the book: it’s diet and exercise advice, aimed at long-term implementation (i.e. not a crash course, but a lifestyle change), for maximum body composition change results while not doing anything silly (like many extreme short-term courses do) and not compromising other aspects of one’s health, while also not taking up an inordinate amount of time.
The dietary advice is sensible, broadly consistent with what we’d advise here, and/but if you want to maximise your body composition change results, you’re going to need a pocket calculator (or be better than this writer is at mental arithmetic).
The exercise advice is detailed, and a lot more specific than “lift things”; there are programs of specifically how many sets and reps and so forth, and when to increase the weights and when not to.
A strength of this book is that it explains why all those numbers are what they are, instead of just expecting the reader to take on faith that the best for a given exercise is (for example) 3 sets of 8–10 reps of 70–75% of one’s single-rep max for that exercise. Because without the explanation, those numbers would seem very arbitrary indeed, and that wouldn’t help anyone stick with the program. And so on, for any advice he gives.
The style is… A little flashy for this reader’s taste, a little salesy (and yes he does try to upsell to his personal coaching, but really, anything you need is in the book already), but when it comes down to it, all that gym-boy bravado doesn’t take away from the fact his advice is sound and helpful.
Bottom line: if you would like your body to be the three things mentioned in the title, this book can certainly help you get there.
Click here to check out Thinner Leaner Stronger, and become thinner, leaner, stronger!
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Are GMOs Good Or Bad For Us?
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Unzipping Our Food’s Genes
In yesterday’s newsletter, we asked you for your (health-related) views on GMOs.
But what does the science say?
First, a note on terms
Technically, we (humans) have been (g)enetically (m)odifying (o)rganisms for thousands of years.
If you eat a banana, you are enjoying the product of many generations of artificial selection, to change its genes to produce a fruit that is soft, sweet, high in nutrients, and digestible without cooking. The original banana plant would be barely recognizable to many people now (and also, barely edible). We’ve done similarly with countless other food products.
So in this article, we’re going to be talking exclusively about modern genetic modification of organisms, using exciting new (ish, new as in “in the last century”) techniques to modify the genes directly, in a copy-paste fashion.
For more details on the different kinds of genetic modification of organisms, and how they’re each done (including the modern kinds), check out this great article from Sciencing, who explain it in more words than we have room for here:
Sciencing | How Are GMOs Made?
(the above also offers tl;dr section summaries, which are great too)
GMOS are outright dangerous (cancer risks, unknown risks, etc): True or False?
False, so far as we know, in any direct* fashion. Obviously “unknown risks” is quite a factor, since those are, well, unknown. But GMOs on the market undergo a lot of safety testing, and have invariably passed happily.
*However! Glyphosate (the herbicide), on the other hand, has a terrible safety profile and is internationally banned in very many countries for this reason.
Why is this important? Because…
- in the US (and two out of ten Canadian provinces), glyphosate is not banned
- In the US (and we may hypothesize, those two Canadian provinces) one of the major uses of genetic modification of foodstuffs is to make it resistant to glyphosate
- Consequently, GMO foodstuffs grown in those places have generally been liberally doused in glyphosate
So… It’s not that the genetic modification itself makes the food dangerous and potentially carcinogenic (it doesn’t), but it is that the genetic modification makes it possible to use a lot more glyphosate without losing crops to glyphosate’s highly destructive properties.
Which results in the end-consumer eating glyphosate. Which is not good. For example:
❝Following the landmark case against Monsanto, which saw them being found liable for a former groundskeeper, 46 year old Dewayne Johnson’s cancer, 32 countries have to date banned the use of Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer. The court awarded Johnson R4.2 billion in damages finding Monsanto “acted with malice or oppression”.❞
Source: see below!
You can read more about where glyphosate is and isn’t banned, here:
33 countries ban the use of Glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup
For the science of this (and especially the GMO → glyphosate use → cancer pipeline), see:
Use of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)-Containing Food Products in Children
GMOs are extra healthy because of the modifications (they were designed for that, right?): True or False?
True or False depending on who made them and why! As we’ve seen above, not all companies seem to have the best interests of consumer health in mind.
However, they can be! Here are a couple of great examples:
❝Recently, two genome-edited crops targeted for nutritional improvement, high GABA tomatoes and high oleic acid soybeans, have been released to the market.
Nutritional improvement in cultivated crops has been a major target of conventional genetic modification technologies as well as classical breeding methods❞
Source: Drs. Nagamine & Ezura
Read in full: Genome Editing for Improving Crop Nutrition
(note, they draw a distinction of meaning between genome editing and genetic modification, according to which of two techniques is used, but for the purposes of our article today, this is under the same umbrella)
Want to know more?
If you’d like to read more about this than we have room for here, here’s a great review in the Journal of Food Science & Nutrition:
Should we still worry about the safety of GMO foods? Why and why not? A review
Take care!
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Relationships: When To Stick It Out & When To Call It Quits
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Like A Ship Loves An Anchor?
Today’s article may seem a little bit of a downer to start with, but don’t worry, it picks up again too. Simply put, we’ve written before about many of the good parts of relationships, e.g:
Only One Kind Of Relationship Promotes Longevity This Much!
…but what if that’s not what we have?
Note: if you have a very happy, secure, fulfilling, joyous relationship, then, great! Or if you’re single and happy, then, also great! Hopefully you will still find today’s feature of use if you find yourself advising a friend or family member one day. So without further ado, let’s get to it…
You may be familiar with the “sunk cost fallacy”; if not: it’s what happens when a person or group has already invested into a given thing, such that even though the thing is not going at all the way they hoped, they now want to continue trying to make that thing work, lest their previous investment be lost. But the truth is: if it’s not going to work, then the initial investment is already lost, and pouring out extra won’t help—it’ll just lose more.
That “investment” in a given thing could be money, time, energy, or (often the case) a combination of the above.
In the field of romance, the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps a lot of bad relationships going for longer than perhaps they should, and looking back (perhaps after a short adjustment period), the newly-single person says “why did I let that go on?” and vows to not make the same mistake again.
But that prompts the question: how can we know when it’s right to “keep working on it, because relationships do involve work”, as perfectly reasonable relationship advice often goes, and when it’s right to call it quits?
Should I stay or should I go?
Some questions for you (or perhaps a friend you might find yourself advising) to consider:
- What qualities do you consider the most important for a partner to have—and does your partner have them?
- If you described the worst of your relationship to a close friend, would that friend feel bad for you?
- Do you miss your partner when they’re away, or are you glad of the break? When they return, are they still glad to see you?
- If you weren’t already in this relationship, would you seek to enter it now? (This takes away sunk cost and allows a more neutral assessment)
- Do you feel completely safe with your partner (emotionally as well as physically), or must you tread carefully to avoid conflict?
- If your partner decided tomorrow that they didn’t want to be with you anymore and left, would that be just a heartbreak, or an exciting beginning of a new chapter in your life?
- What things would you generally consider dealbreakers in a relationship—and has your partner done any of them?
The last one can be surprising, by the way. We often see or hear of other people’s adverse relationship situations and think “I would never allow…” yet when we are in a relationship and in love, there’s a good chance that we might indeed allow—or rather, excuse, overlook, and forgive.
And, patience and forgiveness certainly aren’t inherently bad traits to have—it’s just good to deploy them consciously, and not merely be a doormat.
Either way, reflect (or advise your friend/family member to reflect, as applicable) on the “score” from the above questions.
- If the score is good, then maybe it really is just a rough patch, and the tools we link at the top and bottom of this article might help.
- If the score is bad, the relationship is bad, and no amount of historic love or miles clocked up together will change that. Sometimes it’s not even anyone’s fault; sometimes a relationship just ran its course, and now it’s time to accept that and turn to a new chapter.
“At my age…”
As we get older, it’s easy for that sunk cost fallacy to loom large. Inertia is heavy, the mutual entanglement of lives is far-reaching, and we might not feel we have the same energy for dating that we did when we were younger.
And there may sometimes be a statistical argument for “sticking it out” at least for a while, depending on where we are in the relationship, per this study (with 165,039 participants aged 20–76), which found:
❝Results on mean levels indicated that relationship satisfaction decreased from age 20 to 40, reached a low point at age 40, then increased until age 65, and plateaued in late adulthood.
As regards the metric of relationship duration, relationship satisfaction decreased during the first 10 years of the relationship, reached a low point at 10 years, increased until 20 years, and then decreased again.❞
Source: Development of Relationship Satisfaction Across the Life Span: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
And yet, when it comes to prospects for a new relationship…
- If our remaining life is growing shorter, then it’s definitely too short to spend in an unhappy relationship
- Maybe we really won’t find romance again… And maybe that’s ok, if w’re comfortable making our peace with that and finding joy in the rest of life (this widowed writer (hi, it’s me) plans to remain single now by preference, and her life is very full of purpose and beauty and joy and yes, even love—for family, friends, etc, plus the memory of my wonderful late beloved)
- Nevertheless, the simple fact is: many people do find what they go on to describe as their best relationship yet, late in life ← this study is with a small sample size, but in this case, even anecdotal evidence seems sufficient to make the claim reasonable; probably you personally know someone who has done so. If they can, so can you, if you so wish.
- Adding on to that last point… Later life relationships can also offer numerous significant advantages unique to such (albeit some different challenges too—but with the right person, those challenges are just a fun thing to tackle together). See for example:
An exploratory investigation into dating among later‐life women
And about those later-life relationships that do work? They look like this:
this one looks like the title says it all, but it really doesn’t, and it’s very much worth at least reading the abstract, if not the entire paper—because it talks a lot about the characteristics that make for happy or unhappy relationships, and the effect that those things have on people. It really is very good, and quite an easy read.
See again: Healthy Relationship, Healthy Life
Take care!
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Every Body Should Know This – by Dr. Federica Amati
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This book is very much a primer on how to eat healthily. The science is high-quality (the author is the head nutritionist at ZOE) and well-explained, and the advice is reasonable.
Limitations: this book is not very deep, which we might expect from a book with this title. So, if you’ve been a long-time 10almonds reader, you might not learn a lot here, and this book might make a better gift for someone else.
In particular, the book may be well-suited for someone who is thinking of having children soon, as there is an unusual amount of focus on fertility and young motherhood—perhaps because the author herself has young children and so was preoccupied with this when writing. For those of us who are definitely not having any more children, the focus on young motherhood is a little superfluous.
The writing style is very readable pop-science, and nobody who is able to read English is likely to struggle with this one. It’s also quite conversational in parts, as the author discusses her own experiences with implementing the science at hand.
Bottom line: if you want a good, solid, primer of how to eat well for a lifetime of health, especially if you are (or are thinking of becoming) a young mother, then this is a very good book. Otherwise, it’s probably a better to give it as a gift.
Click here to check out Every Body Should Know This, and know the things!
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Passion Fruit vs Persimmon – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing passion fruit to persimmon, we picked the passion fruit.
Why?
You may be wondering: “what is this fruit passionate about?” and the answer is: delivering nutrients of many kinds!
Looking at the macros first, passion fruit has a little more protein and a lot more fiber, while persimmon has more carbs. This means that while persimmon’s glycemic index isn’t bad, passion fruit’s glycemic index is a lot lower.
In terms of vitamins, passion fruit has a lot more of vitamins A, B2, B3, B6, B9, E, K, and choline, while persimmon has more vitamin C. For the record passion fruit is also a good source of vitamin C, with a cup of passion fruit already giving a day’s daily dose of vitamin C, but persimmon gives twice that. Still, that’s a 8:1 win for passion fruit.
When it comes to minerals, passion fruit has more copper, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while persimmon has more calcium and iron, meaning a 6:2 win for passion fruit.
Adding up the three convincing individual victories shows a clear overall win for passion fruit.
Enjoy (passionately, even)!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Glycemic Index vs Glycemic Load vs Insulin Index
- Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
Take care!
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Speedy Easy Ratatouille
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One of the biggest contributing factors to unhealthy eating? The convenience factor. To eat well, it seems, one must have at least two of the following: money, time, and skill. So today we have a health dish that’s cheap, quick, and easy!
(You won’t need a rat in a hat to help you with this one)
You will need
- 3 ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
- 2 zucchini, halved and chopped into thick batons
- 2 portobello mushrooms, sliced into ½” slices
- 1 large red pepper, cut into thick chunks
- 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
- 2 tbsp finely chopped parsley
- 2 tsp garlic paste
- 1 tsp red chili flakes
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- 1 tsp black pepper
- Optional: 1 tsp MSG, or 1 tsp low sodium salt (the MSG is the healthier option as it contains less sodium than even low sodium salt)
- Optional: other vegetables, chopped. Use what’s in your fridge! This is a great way to use up leftovers. Particularly good options include chopped eggplant, chopped red onion, and/or chopped carrot.
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Put the olive oil into a sauté pan and set the heat on medium. When hot but smoking, add the mushrooms and any optional vegetables (but not the others from the list yet), and fry for 5 minutes.
2) Add the garlic, followed by the zucchini, red pepper, chili flakes, and thyme; stir periodically (you shouldn’t have to stir constantly) for 10 minutes.
3) Add the tomatoes and a cup of water to the pan, along with any MSG/salt. Cover with the lid and allow to simmer for a further 10 minutes.
4) Serve, adding the garnish.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- The Magic Of Mushrooms: “The Longevity Vitamin” (That’s Not A Vitamin)
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits? ← we had 3/5 today!
- Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk?
- MSG vs Salt: Sodium Comparison
Take care!
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