<story><title>A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/upshot/a-medical-mystery-of-the-best-kind-major-diseases-are-in-decline.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>magila</author><text>On the other hand, autoimmune diseases have been increasing in prevalence over the last century. While these diseases are rarely immediately fatal, in severe cases they can have a major impact on quality of life. Onset often occurs in early adulthood so the cost of treatment over a lifetime can be extremely high. The usual treatment, immunosuppressive therapy, also has serious risks of its own.&lt;p&gt;While there has been much progress on finding new treatments, their scope has been limited to new and creative ways of suppressing the immune system. There are a multitude of theories which attempt to explain the causes of autoimmune diseases, but we seem to be quite far from truly understanding them.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Medical Mystery of the Best Kind: Major Diseases Are in Decline</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/upshot/a-medical-mystery-of-the-best-kind-major-diseases-are-in-decline.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lordnacho</author><text>Speculation:&lt;p&gt;- People have become more aware of the risk factors, and behave accordingly. Awareness would be connected to prevalence but have a lagged effect.&lt;p&gt;- Deadly diseases cause evolutionary responses. Perhaps a disproportionate number of people with predisposition to these illnesses passed away before having offspring.&lt;p&gt;- Reporting bias? While an illness looms large in the minds of the medical community, doctors are more likely to either wrongly attribute to the illness (false positive), or do false negatives less often.&lt;p&gt;- Highly speculative: combined effects are non-linear. I don&amp;#x27;t know what they use to do these studies, but typically you hear something along the lines of &amp;quot;for every x, there&amp;#x27;s m*x effect&amp;quot;, which makes things sounds nice and linear. Maybe better prevention and better treatment does better than either on its own summed up, and so you won&amp;#x27;t be able to find the &amp;quot;reason&amp;quot; by splitting into each feature.</text></comment>