<story><title>Alzheimer&apos;s: &apos;Promising&apos; blood test for early stage of disease</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53567486</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I have an idea that&amp;#x27;s been floating around in my head for a while, and I don&amp;#x27;t know how I feel about it. So I&amp;#x27;ll float it here with a note that I am not strenuously advocating for the position I&amp;#x27;m about to express, and instead wish to have it discussed.&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that our modern medical obsession with keeping the body alive for so long is leading to negative outcomes. The rate of Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s diagnoses increases dramatically after about age 70[1]. In the US, we began to see the &lt;i&gt;average&lt;/i&gt; life expectancy increase past 70 in the 1950s, and is now approaching 80[2]. As a result, I think the current crop of people who are alive are among the first to see the effects of truly advanced age. Prior to the 1950s, longer life was always seen as a good thing: you had more time to enjoy relative good health. Since few people lived into their 70s and beyond, we didn&amp;#x27;t see the &amp;quot;bad things&amp;quot; coming. Now that people are living into their 70s and beyond, we start to see the horrible effects of advanced age. So the question, which again I don&amp;#x27;t put forward with much conviction: is continuing to put forward the preservation of life worth it given the extreme decline in quality of life that we see past the age of 70? The gut answer is &amp;quot;obviously yes,&amp;quot; but I think we are the first people to have to truly grapple with this question, as we watch our elders mentally fall to pieces while their bodies chug along. Is that gut answer just the result of centuries of trying to get past year 70? Now that we&amp;#x27;re past it, should we re-evaluate? I have a very close relative in his late 60s going through Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s right now. Would it truly be worse if he had passed away a couple years ago?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s#Epidemiology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s#Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;countries&amp;#x2F;USA&amp;#x2F;united-states&amp;#x2F;life-expectancy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;countries&amp;#x2F;USA&amp;#x2F;united-states&amp;#x2F;life...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ux</author><text>The key word here is &amp;quot;good health&amp;quot;. If you start shifting from &amp;quot;living as long as possible&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;living with the most dignity up until the end&amp;quot;, you end up questioning euthanasia, but also how people live post work-life: typically, how people are going to live decently through their last stage post 60s, can they enter a stage where they are relieved from the stress, pain, etc. You can&amp;#x27;t just say &amp;quot;well let them die earlier&amp;quot; if you don&amp;#x27;t provide some form of hope of relief for their last years.&lt;p&gt;Today I&amp;#x27;d argue that the growing lifespan is used as an argument to make people work longer, which means in worse physical conditions. The &amp;quot;Work until your death&amp;quot; motto (the curse of people living in poverty) is not great for a healthy and attractive society. Questioning it ends up in a heated political&amp;#x2F;societal&amp;#x2F;philosophical discussion pretty quickly. And we&amp;#x27;re definitely not heading in the healthy direction: not because we don&amp;#x27;t want to shift the medical institution, but because we need a more profound society change. From a purely economical PoV, it&amp;#x27;s great that people die before around the beginning retirement, from a societal PoV it&amp;#x27;s a disaster.</text></comment>
<story><title>Alzheimer&apos;s: &apos;Promising&apos; blood test for early stage of disease</title><url>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53567486</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coldpie</author><text>I have an idea that&amp;#x27;s been floating around in my head for a while, and I don&amp;#x27;t know how I feel about it. So I&amp;#x27;ll float it here with a note that I am not strenuously advocating for the position I&amp;#x27;m about to express, and instead wish to have it discussed.&lt;p&gt;I have the feeling that our modern medical obsession with keeping the body alive for so long is leading to negative outcomes. The rate of Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s diagnoses increases dramatically after about age 70[1]. In the US, we began to see the &lt;i&gt;average&lt;/i&gt; life expectancy increase past 70 in the 1950s, and is now approaching 80[2]. As a result, I think the current crop of people who are alive are among the first to see the effects of truly advanced age. Prior to the 1950s, longer life was always seen as a good thing: you had more time to enjoy relative good health. Since few people lived into their 70s and beyond, we didn&amp;#x27;t see the &amp;quot;bad things&amp;quot; coming. Now that people are living into their 70s and beyond, we start to see the horrible effects of advanced age. So the question, which again I don&amp;#x27;t put forward with much conviction: is continuing to put forward the preservation of life worth it given the extreme decline in quality of life that we see past the age of 70? The gut answer is &amp;quot;obviously yes,&amp;quot; but I think we are the first people to have to truly grapple with this question, as we watch our elders mentally fall to pieces while their bodies chug along. Is that gut answer just the result of centuries of trying to get past year 70? Now that we&amp;#x27;re past it, should we re-evaluate? I have a very close relative in his late 60s going through Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s right now. Would it truly be worse if he had passed away a couple years ago?&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s#Epidemiology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Alzheimer&amp;#x27;s#Epidemiology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;countries&amp;#x2F;USA&amp;#x2F;united-states&amp;#x2F;life-expectancy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.macrotrends.net&amp;#x2F;countries&amp;#x2F;USA&amp;#x2F;united-states&amp;#x2F;life...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>graeme</author><text>&amp;gt; As a result, I think the current crop of people who are alive are among the first to see the effects of truly advanced age.&lt;p&gt;You’re mistaking average for median life expectancy. People lived to older ages in the past. But lots of babies died, so the average life expectancy was way down. Add a lot of zeros to a number series and it gets pretty low.&lt;p&gt;Ancient comedy even had a stock character, sexex iratus: angry old man. Certainly there are many more very old people now, but it wasn’t something totally unknown.&lt;p&gt;The aging of people has also coincided with a decline in our physical health and diets. Strength is declining year on year: we have grip strength measures for college age students since the 1980s and it is a steady decline. Diets are worse, people are much fatter and with more health problems such as type 2 diabetes.&lt;p&gt;One of the theories of alzheimers is that it is a form of diabetes. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC2769828&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC2769828&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Certainly it is correlated with type 2 diabetes, and with obesity in mid life. (Not in late life, but this may be because sudden weight loss is a precursor of alzheimers &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC6205180&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&amp;#x2F;pmc&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;PMC6205180&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Have a look at this chart. Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world, and yet its alzheimers death rate is less than 6x that of the usa: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.worldlifeexpectancy.com&amp;#x2F;cause-of-death&amp;#x2F;alzheimers-dementia&amp;#x2F;by-country&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.worldlifeexpectancy.com&amp;#x2F;cause-of-death&amp;#x2F;alzheimer...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is more to this than just age. Our lifestyles increasingly leave us hobbled by ailments at young ages, and the medical system patches it up and lets us live through them longer. But this expresses in much more old age morbidity than would otherwise be biologically necessary.</text></comment>