Microbiome researcher here. Like many microbiome results - this paper has tantalizing evidence of a powerful and systemic effect, but extremely limited direct evidence. The primary experiment in the paper is the transfer of stool contents from old mice to young mice (and vice versa). The chemical complexity of stool is hard to overstate - it's one of the most chemically diverse environments known. While the microbes are ~75% of the weight of feces (and thus of the fecal transplant) there is a huge complement of other things including host-derived effector molecules, fungal, and viral components. Three things that I think are important to think about:
1) A critical experiment to determine that it is bacteria (or fungal/virus) per se and not a host effector would be the transfer of contents from aged germ-free control mice (mice without microbes of any type). The authors mention a transfer protocol that could be optimized for fungal commensals, but don't address the more important germ-free control.
2) It is hard to characterize individual immune metabolites/signals (e.g. IL-10, IL-6, etc.) as either good or bad. The context determines the effect and they show changes in at least 20 cytokines in Fig 3E. While they focus on IL-6 and TNF, it's not immediately clear those are necessarily a part of pathogenic inflammageing. LBP conversely, seems pretty hard to interpret as anything but evidence of barrier permeability and this result seems strong.
3) It's not clear how much of this effect would sustain over the long term. The amount of time between fecal transplant and mouse sacrifice/result generation was only 18 days. Experiments with such a short duration seem like they might capture an unrelated effect due to some other coincident factor.
Overall, a well done paper with a lot of interesting things, but also reasons to be very skeptical of the magnitude of this effect. As usual, I will end with: you can dramatically improve your microbiome health (whatever that term actually means) by eating a high fiber diet like most humans did for most of evolutionary time.
As a parent of young children, I have had sustained exposure to a diverse medley of fecal specimens varying in color, odor, consistency, and texture. Is there a particular stripe I should be targeting for transplanting from my children’s into my own microbiome?
No its not, people are just ignorant. You eat ton of shit.
CTO of Microsoft wrote 6 books on molecular gastronomy named Modernist Cousine [1]. There are lots of pages in first book about managing environmental fecal matter (hint: there is a LOT of it around you and in the food you eat).
I would slightly modify your suggestion for 1; it may be easier to gamma irradiate the fecal samples (or something) to kill all microflora instead. It won’t tell us whether the chemical effectors came from the host or the bugs but I would prefer comparing healthy mice than two separate classes of mice.
Another idea I’m curious about would be to preserve fecal samples from a young mouse and transplant back to their older selves to see if that also shows the same effect.
No, its mostly because it can't be digested at all by humans but are food for bacteria as every cow knows. The benefit of slow digestion by fiber is mostly for diabetes control.
Fixing microflora (and hence influencing metagenome) however, is not that simple. You wont feed good bacteria only, but pathogenic too if you have them overpopulated, which will make things worst. You can't easily replace those with new ones coming from food because of the acid barrier. You might think that lowering it down is good idea, but its totally not, because you will soon find new neighbor h. pylory which can cause all kinds of shit, along with having less nutrientes available by stealing and unoptimal pH environment. Regular probiotics are usually meaningless (influencing environment like fart in the wind).
Eating carnivoir diet makes your acid stronger which further strenghtens your defences (only great if you don't have invaders).
Then, this is dynamic - good guys can become bad in specific context.
The best way to improve your microbiome health is to find FT surogate, some great probiotic like Visbiome or VSL3, eat fermented foods, use prebiotics, and obviously dont use antibiotics in relaxed manner (save them for emergencies, like once in decade, and even then help flora repopulation and good luck with fungi proliferation) and do not remove your apendix just for the sake of it.
Funny thing nobody mentiond antibiotics and how harmful they are. Yes, they can save your life but poping them every now and then borders to malpractice.
I am a software architect, not a doctor, but machine is a machine.
And yet, there is no evidence at all that people who take more antibiotics live shorter or worse quality lives...so does any of this really matter at all?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have pretty strong data that suggests that antibiotic exposure is associated with negative health outcomes. For example, patients who had undergone antibiotic exposure within a 6 month period preceding their admission to the ICU had a 20% increase in mortality rate.
Another study [1] I just found showed that older women who had been exposed to antibiotics for => 2 months had increased risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality (hazard ratio 1.49). Interestingly, if they had also been exposed to antibiotics in middle-adulthood, their mortality rate was even higher; which may suggest that antibiotic exposure permanently impairs the microbiome. Paper's conclusion: "Long-term use of antibiotics in late adulthood may be a risk factor for all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. The unfavorable effect of antibiotic exposure for subsequent risks of deaths due to chronic diseases needs to be considered."
> For example, patients who had undergone antibiotic exposure within a 6 month period preceding their admission to the ICU had a 20% increase in mortality rate.
That seems like a very obvious case of correlation vs causation (people who need medicine are more likely to die than those who dont)
Kindly don’t say stuff like this. After taking antibiotics I had severe, severe anxiety that lasted months along with insomnia. Now the anxiety is mostly gone but I’m still dealing with some sleep issues. If you google antibiotics anxiety microbiome you can read a bunch of studies.
Sorry. Anecdotes are not useful or instructive here. No studies show a causal effect of antibiotics on anxiety. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if people who needed medical treatment (causing an antibiotic Rx) later had anxiety due to the nature of their health condition.
Sorry, none of these establish causality, only very mild (probably specious) correlations. One of them is only in cancer patients which is basically worthless when discussing the general population. The rest are in mice, which doesn't translate to humans in general, especially not where psychological issues like anxiety are concerned. There is definitely some possibility for future research though. Even a single replication of any of these studies would be helpful. But so far there's no reason to think a causal link exists.
I agree that causality isn’t established in the human studies. But with the population studies and the mice studies where causation is established that is a strong suggestion for further research as you said. If I were a betting man I would bet a lot of money on this link though, based on my experience and these studies (and there’s more). I think you would too, to a lesser extent :)
And I’m pretty sure one of the human studies does establish causation, although I don’t have time to see which one
It is somewhat rude to speak in imperative ("don't say stuff like this"), and it is completely non-informative. If you disagree with someone, stating your reasons is much more likely to change others' mind than speaking in imperative, which only makes you look like a bully ("don't say stuff like this or I'll take your lunch money").
Interesting, I haven't considered that. I'm curious whether the form of talking (assuming the poster is Indian) is caused by language structure or culture.
Still, I hope that my post was received by the poster as informational, despite its somewhat harsh tone. No matter your background, knowing how to present your ideas in a non-confrontational way will surely make more people listen to you.
You know where half of the worlds antibiotics go to? As growth promotion on animals. Growth promotion => obesity => metabolic syndrome => diabetes => shorter life (diabetes basically being accelerated aging disease)
Please, this should be primary school knowledge nowadays.
Try to keep up. The person I responded to was specifically talking about humans ingesting antibiotic medicines, so my claim was responding directly to that behavior. If you want to try to prove that cows taking antibiotics makes humans more obese than they otherwise would be, that's fine but it has nothing to do with the original claim about human medicines.
Even relatively short term use of antibiotics can result in digestive issues lasting multiple years. Auto-brewery syndrome for example is linked to antibiotics and can seemingly persist until treatment by antifungals.
Of course. Yet still, there is no evidence that these people would live shorter or worse lives than if they hadn't taken the antibiotic. What if the infection they took the antibiotics for had caused more harm than auto-brewery syndrome? What if the unchecked infection caused problems that couldn't simply be solved by antifungals? My point was just that the person I responded to seemed to imply that antibiotics are very bad except in cases where they save your life, which is not really supported by current medical knowledge.
That’s assuming the antibiotics where needed, overprescribing them is extremely common even with viral infections. Peoples immune system can deal with the vast majority of bacterial infections, it just takes slightly longer than a trip to the doctor.
From a doctors perspective prescribing antibiotics encourages people to show up with minor illness, it’s bad medicine but good business practice.
Couple of comments replied mentioning studies in this area, and you dismiss them completely (i.e. you show no indication of any value assigned on points made). Seems like you have very strong beliefs/faith/stake in using antibiotics as tic toc.
If you get UTIs serveral times a year, you should seriously rethink your life habits. By doing that you will temporarily fix one disease and pay the price having array of other.
Work in the field myself. The real answer is definitely we don’t know, but for whatever reason a high diversity (lots of different kinds of bacteria) seems to be almost universally good. Fiber is the major carbohydrate source for our gut microbiome, and a fiber-rich and fiber-diverse diet seems to provide lots of niches for various bugs to grow.
I'm not an expert, but I would probably have guessed the opposite. Lots of fiber means nice, consistent bowel movements. I'm pretty sure it speeds up your digestive tract, if anything -- it doesn't take a long time to digest, it doesn't digest at all.
> eating a high fiber diet like most humans did for most of evolutionary time
Can supplementation be an effective substitute for fiber derived from real foods? If so, are there any particular kinds of supplements you'd recommend?
Yerba Prima Psyllium can not be beat. It takes a couple weeks to get used to it, and I don’t mean only your gut: it does not dissolve in water, so when you mix the powder in water, you end up drinking what has the consistency of sludge. There is no flavor.
Personally, I've decided chia seeds are a good way to get more fiber. Also a good source of omega-3s. More calories than some other options, but I like the idea of whole foods. They have a decent mix of soluble/insoluble fiber.
Chia is not a good source of omega-3 because they are primarily ALA Omega-3:
“ALA, the most common omega-3 fat, is an essential fatty acid that is converted into EPA and DHA. However, this conversion process is inefficient in humans. On average, only 1–10% of ALA is converted into EPA and 0.5–5% into DHA”
Are you already eating tons of fruits and veggies (10 servings/day) and a good amount of whole grains? If not, I think that's where to start, rather than jumping into supplementation. IANAD
This is going to sound crass but I am willing to be the sacrifical lamb to my own (and others) potential benefit: can my wife poop in my butt and can I poop in hers to gain some benefit?
Along these lines, are there any potential health benefits to penis in butt sex? Or does the poop need to enter my butt?
I am legitimately asking a question in complete seriousness and I would like to know the answers. The subject itself is crass because it has to do with our excrement and sex. Please don't push this out of visibility because you find the subject (or the direct language I use) distasteful. Thank you.
Faecal transplants that happen during birth are one mechanism that the body uses to pass down healthy bacteria to the next generation.
People born with C-section before this was known have higher rates of various digestive diseases. At leading hospitals, faecal transplants are done to c-section babies.
"Who invented vaginal seeding?
Researchers at New York University first wiped (swabbed) babies born by C-section with their mother’s vaginal fluids. They wanted to see if the babies would develop the same microbes that they would have developed after vaginal birth."
I work in a hospital and use to consult with labour and delivery units on all things infections. I received a lot of calls about moms seeding their babies themselves. They would often ask the staff for gauze which they would use to seed the babies mouths and eyes. Most would do it one time, but some would have containers they would store some moist gauze and seed the baby over a few days.
We obviously advised against this practice since there are a lot of unknowns, but what moms do with their babies in their room is up to them.
Obviously someone with FAANG money if you can afford “gas station” sushi. I have to go to the grocery store at 9:00 at night when the discount the sushi left in the refrigerated case
I mean, your gut will get seeded even if you’re a c-section baby.
There is a reason why households have similar microbiome a over time - despite good hygiene practices bacteria (even fecal bacteria) will be passed from person to person.
There is zero need to do a fecal transplant on a baby that is delivered via c-section, except in some rare case where they get a C. difficile infection or something.
> EDIT: Pedantically, I know that's not a 'transplant,'
On the contrary, I think that would generally be considered a fecal transplant. I believe the history of the procedure started with oral administration of the transplanted material, mixed into a chocolate milkshake.
The organs are far from sterile, whole pathways are very close, there is a lot of pushing beyond control which uses sort of same muscles... it doesn't mean every natural baby is born with big poop on their head (mine weren't), but these transfers do happen. You don't need that many bacteria to make it work, infant's intestines are a sterile place at the beginning so not much competition and food for them starts coming soon.
The digestive system is supposed to be fully sandboxed from the host. Topologically it is as exoneous to your body as your skin and the sandboxing is necessary for your bacteria to not digest yourself.
I would appreciate references on permeability mechanisms allowing for bacteria movement inside the body, on healthly humans.
I mean there is a digestive system to human blood interface but I doubt it allow bacteria/archae/parasites/shrooms/atypical single celled eukaryotes to cross it.
(little known but ~30% of your microbes are not bacteria but archae and withouth those we would not fart)
Did you read the comment you are responding to as saying bacterial travel through the intestinal wall, through the vagina, and into the fetus? It seems like it, but that isn't at all what op said.
The bacterial transfer happens after the placenta has broken and the baby is being pushed out of the vagina. The vaginal opening and anus are inches away. The woman is bearing down to push out the baby and there can be discharges from the anus. Even if that doesn't happen, the area around the anus isn't entirely antiseptic.
of course contamination can happen once the baby it out of the mother body. I was refuting the intra-body contamination thesis.
cf: > The organs are far from sterile, whole pathways are very close
That does not imply intra-body transfer, though. It’s exactly what it says. The digestive organs and the vaginal canal are not sterile, and their pathways converge at the bottom end. Seems pretty straightforward from the rest of the comment that, once the amniotic sac breaks it’s a bacterial slip all the way out, with a surprise at the end.
That bears repeating. One of the grossest things I've ever witnessed (which wasn't something dead) was my son immediately after he was born. I was impressed.
If there's fecal transfer I would think its between the baby and the mother. A baby poops a lot and a mother cleans up, probably gets some on her hands. Maybe a baby regulates the mothers digestive system in some beneficial way to the baby.
Many women never get back to the shape they were in before birth and stay fat after? Could be a permanent change in their gut bacteria, caused by the baby to get the mother to overeat to produce more milk for the baby.
While this looks exciting it does say "in mice" so I take it with a grain of salt.
I'm guessing the next step here is to try this in humans. Would there be less regulations/approval times involved in doing this vs say testing a new anti-ageing drug?
I recall reading about people doing this on their own, for the same reasons exposed in this paper. There’s probably years of subject data already available.
My dog loves eating the faeces of other animals, including those of my cats. I suspect the reason is to boost his gut flora and keep him healthy for longer than he otherwise would be.
There are plenty of animals that do this for instinctual hygiene reasons (cleaning up after young in a den for example) and plenty of animals that do this to give digestion another go, having inefficient digestive systems. Among other reasons.
Are there any downsides to messing with your gut bacteria? I seem to see a strong bias of positive studies, but if our gut bacteria is as important as it seems to be, shouldn't there also be horrible outcomes to these kinds of experiments?
I would think that any positive effect could be reversed by essentially giving the opposite. Want to decrease inflammation? Get a younger gut biome. Mess up and get an older gut biome and you probably end up with increased inflammation.
There is also evidence that fecal transplant recipients take on physical and mental traits of the donor.
"There have been people who have taken on the shape of the donor, such as if the donor is either overweight or underweight they've become more like that."
"There's even been reports of some people who have never been depressed getting a transplant from someone who's had depression and ending up with their first episode of depression after that."
Yeah. I have an annoying, but not debilitating autoimmune disease. I’ve read case studies of people who got a FMT for other reasons (fixing gut infection in hospital) who have the same disease but much worse having massive reductions in symptoms for years. I think maybe there are some RCTs happening now for it but I think they still have some years to run.
But yeah, reading the stories like what you linked is why I am very wary - I really want to be able to get a prepared mix of isolated, cultured, known good bacteria that can be inserted in to just seed some more of the good stuff. I think that removes a lot more of the ‘ick’ factor (even if the bacteria strains were originally isolated from faecal samples) even though what I have is bad enough that I would totally do a normal FMT if I thought it was safe enough!
I got very sick from drinking (well-boiled!) water when i was desperate on an island in the Caribbean for some water. For the next 3 years I had horrible gut issues and was basically told by a doctor that there's only management and not really any cure for it.
Then I heard about this probiotic bacteria called limosilactobacillus reuteri which was implicated in a bunch of studies as something that they used to find in people's guts back before processed food really became a huge thing and all these very clear links to a variety health effects (I'll just link the wiki page) [1]. When I went to the store it was the most expensive on the shelf, 40$, but I figured why not and got a couple of them. Haven't had any gut issues since.
I think there's worse things you can do to your guts than using the right probiotics for sure.
lactobacillus reuteri? I can't find the specific one you're saying but I found one on amazon that was the one single strain of lactobacillus reuteri for $50. No it looks like you were correct at least that it exists.
I guess they mean 'GUM PerioBalance'? but everything i find about it seems to be press releases of the company who patented the strain (sunstar), even the wiki page reads like an ad...
Your wiki link is missing. But I've had gut issues for a year since eating something bad. I've tried everything, seen a dozen doctors. Very curious about this.
There are indeed. Basically if you take certain antibiotics you're rolling the dice, because they kill off a bunch of your gut bacteria, and when the populations recover you might end up with toxic strains dominant which is an acute illness. I got a c difficile infection after a strong round of antibiotics. It took months to recover, because basically the treatment is to take more rounds of antibiotics and hope the right bacteria dominate.
I wonder if ingestion of relatively large amounts of robust probiotics would have helped. I've tended kefir grains off and on for the last 20 years or so, and have read that the curd that forms from kefir remains intact a bit deeper into the GI tract than e.g. yogurt. Some people eat the grains themselves which seems like it would be a large, robust colony of mostly helpful bacteria that I assume would fight for territory against c diff.
Reminds me, it's probably time to source some more kefir grains!
Yes, in fact I didn’t put in all the details, after several rounds of unsuccessful antibiotic treatments I basically megadosed probiotics in several forms. It was that which actually stabilized me. I know the research is here or there, but due to that I always get a bunch of probiotics after I have antibiotics. I didn’t use kefir grains though, will look into that!
Yes there is generally a bias towards "do something" and if you've done something obviously it helps (so it seems people think).
Then again, it seems like in general the biggest gut bacteria problems come from an overpopulation of one type and not enough diversity which intervention seems less likely to cause.
There are also parasites which could be transferred but I really doubt that this would happen accidentally (hookworms, tapeworms, other things I don't know about).
But this is always a good thought.
If some treatment has the capability to actually help, it also has the capability to harm, there really isn't such thing as something which is exclusively good regardless of how you use it.
I've self administered FMT's from a friend for over a year now. There is an underground network of people performing this procedure, generally digestive but also psychiatric conditions. I'm not recommending it, however.
In my case, I had debilitating health issues after a round of food poisoning that nearly took my life. In my specific case, the FMT's have helped a lot. Certainly, it is not without risks; however, one can minimize their risks by testing donor's stool, and asking for a full mental and physical evaluation to be performed.
Yep. I was in the habit of drinking kombucha, thinking it could only help my gut bacteria. Drank some random kombucha once and I've had terrible gut issues for a year since.
I remember a decade or two there being some research on using the cadence of their typing to identify and authenticate computer users. I'm sure I'm not the first to make a joke that it was "Fecal recognition... identifying you by the crap you type."
Would definitely be an interesting remake if that scene from Silicon Valley, where the billionaire is getting a blood transfusion from his young "blood boy", did this instead...
I was acutely involved in similar work a while ago (I was a donor for many C diff, IBS, Crohns patients and autism patients).
The science/theory may have changed, but the potential link between gut microbiome and autism for awhile was thought to do with the levels of Clostrium (Clostridia?... can't remember back to my microbiology days) bacteria in babies. Most babies are born with high levels of Clostridium species in their gut, as you may know, clostridium are usually very good at producing toxins (botulism, c. diff, perfringens etc). Majority of babies seem to get rid of these bacteria at 10 months or so, but those with autism seem to hold onto them. The thinking is these bacteria continue to produce low levels of neurotoxins that affect the brain. It seems to be supported with anecdotal research which shows improvement in autism symptoms in younger children who are given transplants but not older children. The thought being the years of toxin affect on the brain has been too much.
The more studies that are done, the more evidence there is that bacteria from the 'gut biome' affects quite a bit in your body. My armchair summary on this is that the cells pull bacteria from the gut and move it about the body.
Seems fairly linear no? Gut biome digests food to ingest nutrients which are used by the eyes and brain, ergo more efficient processes produce better results for them?
You'd think so, but things like probiotics, and diet-based approaches to curing disease is still considered alternative medicine. Many doctors are way behind on this stuff, and we'll probably be waiting on a Kuhnian scientific revolution to occur before this really enters mainstream medicine.
For example, I have a family member with Crohn's and the majority of doctors they saw were adamant that diet would not alter the symptoms of the disease, and the only way to treat it was using drugs like prednisone (steroid) or Humira (TNF blocker), both of which can have awful side effects.
With some major dietary adjustments, and the guidance of "non-traditional" doctors, my family member is in full remission, and has met countless other people with Crohn's, Hashimoto's, and other diseases caused by chronic inflammation who have essentially been cured this way, too.
"recipients were ... twice delivered ... donor microbiota ... by oral gavage of fecal slurry preparation."
More seriously the linked article didn't mention that for the recipients they destroy the existing microbiota via multiple antibiotics prior to transplant of the new.
If you honestly believe this, then you are dismissing nearly all experimental biology. This is a reason why scientists wanted to keep CLOSED journals, because of the lack of interpretation by the wider world. Not all publications are the final word, it's a model.
Search my comment history for a deeper dive on this one. It's not a productive reply. You might not like it, but that is the state of the art. Animal models are 100% a valid way to do things.
Also ITT: HN figures out that natural childbirth involves poop touching a newborn. Cmon, seriously? How do you not know this?
Hate away! As I've said before, out of hand dismissal of any publishing due to mouse models is very in fashion here at HN.
I strongly agree with you that primates would be a better model, from a cost is no object, no public opinion perspective. In fact, probably to many people's non-surprise, most primate work has been moved to China to avoid scrutiny. Last I saw at my place, primates were primarily (ha!) used for behavioral studies and nothing grisly.
I'll see your "here are the differences" and raise you a here are the similarities to humans:
* We're around 85% genetically identical to mice overall if we dump (actually controversial idea) junk DNA. This number varies on who you ask.
* Certain genes can be up to 99% the same. Your gene of interest being similar is important.
* We're both mammals. (some models are not)
* We share many of the same biochemical systems, endocrine, etc.
* Many genes for known diseases are shared. Disease similarity can be very high. (think cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes)
* Mice can be made immunodeficient and used with human material.
* Very well studied life cycle, and measurement of health. We know most measurable parameters and their nominal ranges.
To harmonize with your idea of differences to humans here are the ones that make mice even more useful:
* Reproduce fast, this means ideas can be tested early and often.
* Small. Cheap to house, and make at scale.
* Genetically identical clones: we're better than ever at this now. This increases our ability to repeat and vet research.
It is completely standard for work to be done in mice. This constant dismissal of mouse models is a nothing burger. Animal models don't always pan out, however that's the state of the art.
I agree with you that in a no holds barred world primates would be universally better. In the US, IACUC exists because of primate experiments gone off the rails at Penn in the 80s. "Unnecessary Fuss" is the vid/incident. Video release was 83 I think? IACUC showed up 1985. This put primate work in the US under intense scrutiny and not without reason.
Oh and for what it's worth, I've never see a lab rodent's tail come back in 6 years of working with them. :) You are sending me on a new search!
Maybe if we're lucky we'll see a response from microbiome person.
I'll admit my reply was spicy, but grandparent's reply is borderline noise / bot tier discourse. HN can do better, and I think your reply is a good sign of that!
Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) is an experimental medical procedure where an emergency department patient is cooled into suspended animation for an hour to prevent incipient death from ischemia, such as the blood loss following a shooting or stabbing.
That page doesn’t say this is a net win or worked well at all, but it’s a difficult line of research. Not only are the first patients almost dead at the start of the process (as is always the case with high-risk of death experimental procedures), but there also is no way to know when a patient will show up.
Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) is a surgical technique that induces deep medical hypothermia. It involves cooling the body to temperatures between 20 °C (68 °F) to 25 °C (77 °F), and stopping blood circulation and brain function for up to one hour.
I think that’s a proven winner for some patients, but only at relatively high temperatures (“Profound hypothermia (< 14 °C) usually isn't used clinically. It is a subject of research in animals and human clinical trials”)
Besides the research discussed in the other comments we have now many documented cases of people falling into extremely cold water in the winter, being pulled out after an hour, and recovering. The warming has to be done properly though, if you just pull them out and heat them up immediately they'll die. If you just pull them out and let them warm up very slowly in a warm room they'll die. You have to heat them up as evenly as you can at a certain rate.
When you consider that oxygen deprivation is the primary cause of cell death it makes sense. Cooling down the cells greatly reduces their metabolism and thus oxygen requirements. But cooling the heart down before the brain just makes the brain run out of oxygen first. The more oxygen-dependent the organ the more critical it is that organ be cooled first. Conversely you can't warm up those organs before the heart and lungs or they'll survive that long time of cooling only to die during warming due to lack of oxygen.
Some people are documented as surviving in freezing temperatures for extended periods, yes.
This is what you would expect from freezing. It preserves things. The difficulty with freezing is getting back up to normal temperatures safely. (And the creation of ice crystals, which can be very damaging.)
I think it was tried with larger mammals and it didn't work, which is why the research for humans was dropped. The hope that at some point in the future it may be possible is the entire point of cryonics.
No idea, but another comment claims it works for severed body parts. I'd assume that freezing an attached bodypart would have complications due to circulation being hindered in non frozen parts of the body, and it would be painful.
Don't think a 21st century ethics board is gonna be onboard for doing such an experiment either.
people in siberia/artic regularly freeze their fingers, no need to have cobayes.
Blocking the circulation in the hand does not make someone die, many people survived loosing an arm for a reason.
What must be said though is that while freezing allow for partial body rescuscitation, let's not be fooled. The mice or body part might behave normally, but the body has suffered from a lot of possibly permanent damage (conformational changes, oxidative stress). I expect rescuscitated humans to have a lower quality of life and reduced lifespan, although that's fucking worth it for being rescuscitated!!
One reason is that ice has that annoying property of taking more volume than water. This has consequences. However modern cryogenics aims to vitrify water, which is a special kind of ice that does not take more space!
What people don't know is that structurally preserving organs AKA cryogenics, is a solved problem. Researchers have done that sucessfully to a pig's brain, preserving 100% of its structure. The current issue is that while we can preserve the body without structural losses, we don't know how to reanimate it because the chemicals they uses become toxic upon reanimation and there is no known way to extract it fast enough.
As a reminder, before rescuscitating humans, cryogenics will allow better preservation of blood and organ donations.
I know this was a joke but there's quite a few medical conditions that recent research seems to think can be cured by a poop enema. There's surely a market for a company to do screening, storage, and sales of feces in a similar way to sperm banks. As for price, if you can get it approved by insurance, 1 BTC may end up being cheap!
There's a lot of crap posted on pubmed. And why didn't you just say... not well studied, not well supported, etc? If Cochrane were to review it would they say the evidence is weak for anything you could possibly claim.
Cochrane is a massive failure, they systematically ignore the relevant research.
BPC is litterally called the Body Protective Compound, what more hint do you need?
There are 164 studies on pubmed, the vast majority showing potent geroprotective power. In addition it is by far one of the most effective treatment for IBS and it remarkably potently reduce the time it takes for injuries to resorb and the quality of the repaired tissue.
It has angiogenic advantages vs VEGF and I have seen many people trying it for various "incurable" disease and finding it was the first thing that helped them (e.g. a connective tissue disease).
The thing is 1) people, including most researchers, are scientifically illiterate 2) In addition to mediocrity, incentives are fundamentaly extremely broken given that those peptides, being endogenously produced by the human body (a trenscendant characteristic versus synthethic drugs, which dramatically reduce the propensity of side effects)) it is not patentable. Substances endogenously created by the body cannot be patented and therefore cannot be monetized hence nobody will ever pay clinical trials. Of course a world where medecine can't leverage the same tech as the human body is doomed to be very limited.
Well played pessimizer. Yes indeed naming can be misleading or outright delusional. I don't think Miracle Mineral Supplement was named after scientists discovered empiric evidence of a miracle action though..
Anyway the naming is irrelevant, I just said it for the style and because it add strength (only in the case we assume the namers are not fraudulent). As said, irrelevant.
actually sex pills (PDE-5 inhibitors) are extremelly interesting, they are potent nootropics, increase healthspan, cancel MDMA neurotoxicity, potently protect the heart.. they are one of the best drug class humanity has found for longevity
It blows my mind that HR people are so medically illiterate.
All that coming from the folks which supposedly like to hack around, while this machine called body is taken by totally different standards. I see next to 0 curiosity, exploration, auditing, logging, do-it-yourself attitude. Stakes are higher, eh ?
Or did I imagine sentences like FT works only in mice, are there downside of messing with gut bacteria? (omg?), do people really eat shit (wtf?), how poop transfers during birth (:S) ...
1) A critical experiment to determine that it is bacteria (or fungal/virus) per se and not a host effector would be the transfer of contents from aged germ-free control mice (mice without microbes of any type). The authors mention a transfer protocol that could be optimized for fungal commensals, but don't address the more important germ-free control.
2) It is hard to characterize individual immune metabolites/signals (e.g. IL-10, IL-6, etc.) as either good or bad. The context determines the effect and they show changes in at least 20 cytokines in Fig 3E. While they focus on IL-6 and TNF, it's not immediately clear those are necessarily a part of pathogenic inflammageing. LBP conversely, seems pretty hard to interpret as anything but evidence of barrier permeability and this result seems strong.
3) It's not clear how much of this effect would sustain over the long term. The amount of time between fecal transplant and mouse sacrifice/result generation was only 18 days. Experiments with such a short duration seem like they might capture an unrelated effect due to some other coincident factor.
Overall, a well done paper with a lot of interesting things, but also reasons to be very skeptical of the magnitude of this effect. As usual, I will end with: you can dramatically improve your microbiome health (whatever that term actually means) by eating a high fiber diet like most humans did for most of evolutionary time.