This is great. But, the root of the problem for most postmenopausal women is simply the lack of estrogen. You need estrogen to make bone. Men and women do. Men are mostly protected from osteoporosis because they convert testosterone to estrogen. Elderly men have more estrogen than postmenopausal women. Their levels go to near zero. It's a tragedy that more doctors don't recommend HRT for older women, at least some level of replacement, maybe not up to peak levels when they were younger. The lack of estrogen causes a lot of suffering.
When I was 32 I had a sudden cerebral spine fracture, I was diagnosed as having severe Osteoporosis(I was told my bones were like that of 80 year old); The doctors didn't bother much as I was living with Achondroplasia (Dwarfism) and they attributed everything to it.
I'm on bisphosphonate treatment (zoledronic acid), I've already had 5 of those injections and I recently learnt that it could lead to severe side effects and not that effective for treating Osteoporosis.
Meanwhile I underwent a genetic testing and the result came out as I have COMP8 mutation which leads to
Multiple epiphyseal dysplasia or Pseudo-achondroplasia; Both of which affects bones to different extent and I have symptoms for both.
I'm now looking for treatments which can help improve my bone density or at-least prevent further deterioration, CCN3 looks really promising. I even started a project to monitor bone health using BMD (Dexa) reports[1] and to submit reports for research (I'm looking for researchers in this area).
1 in 3 women over the age of 50 years and 1 in 5 men will experience osteoporotic fractures in their lifetime, According to this article more than 200 million people worldwide suffer from osteoporosis but I feel investment in bone health research is not enough.
Men are also more likely to do strength training, which also helps build bone density. Women are also more likely to regularly perform cardio/aerobic exercises, which can reduce bone density when done in excess and without adequate nutrition. Lack of estrogen is of course the root, but I think we can't dismiss behavior differences contributing to the effect. In my experience, many women do minimal to no strength training because they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine. Maybe this is a really bad idea to live by.
> many women do minimal to no strength training because they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine.
I've observed this as being a very widespread belief too, and it seems like we need to be giving women a better biology education or something, because holy shit is it wrong.
I guess it's more a misconception among the general non weight training public that this stuff is so easy you can basically develop a muscular, masculine body on accident.
For all but the youngest and most genetically blessed males it takes years of very specific diet and exercise regimes. Or steroids.
Whereas just adding some weighted squats into her routine will have immense health benefits for most women as well as making their body look more feminine and attractive.
Men could also stop policing women's bodies and activities. I have had my doctor tell me to do load-bearing exercises but I've also heard men mock not just masculine-looking women, but women who are interested in male-coded activities like weight lifting.
No one is "policing bodies and activities" here, sounds to me like you are just being oversensitive and trying to twist the discussion into one that hates on guys. This sort of coded misandry doesn't work on me anymore, it's so overused, many people have wised up.
So I will say it again: any woman who thinks she will accidentally develop a masculine physique is a fool. She has a poor understanding of weight training and the human body.
Just as any man who thinks he'll get that physique on accident is also a fool!
I wager more men like it than men who mock it. Sports Illustrated is popular for a reason, fit women being considered attractive is very mainstream. There will always be a few assholes that will mock anybody for anything, but what can anybody do about that?
You must have heard it already but you won’t turn into Arnold by doing bodyweight squats 3 days a week for a year. It will, however, shape your body and rearrange fat deposits into more conventionally attractive positions and I don’t think there’s anyone around saying that’s not attractive.
Far more men like women with good-looking fit bodies. It's a statistically insignificant minority that likes "fat women", so "men" overall aren't policing women's bodies to the point of influencing women to not go to the gym. It's largely women who do it to each other.
>It’s a statistically insignificant minority that likes “far women”
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true, many men like “curvy” women, but generally even they are regularly working out. It would be more accurate to say that men dislike unhealthy women. But then you could say the same thing about men.
Read of a study years ago that had postmenopausal wpmen do weight training - giving a dramatic 40% increase in bone density in 6 weeks IIRC the details.
It's not that frail people need to be inactive, but that inactivity causes frailty.
Is that trained or untrained? "Newbie gains" is a real thing, mostly caused by people going from a negative health state to a "normal" health state (or inactivity to basic activity).
I can see a rapid increase in untrained people but more marginal increases in trained people because of this.
I was under the impression newbie gains were more attributable to better neuromuscular and connective tissue adaptation rather than something that can lead to bone growth. You can gain like 2-4lbs of muscle per month in that phase, and a disproportionate amount of strength.
A 40% increase in bone density over 6 weeks sounds like someone’s DEXA scanner is broken. Bones just don’t change that quickly.
Is there a case of bone density being "too low" in some sense that can cause it to go up more quickly? Maybe it's not the bones themselves but something the DEXA scanner picks up that looks like bone growth?
> they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine
Yes, this is a common concern. It would be good to show women what it looks like to workout hard six days a week for more than one year. (My point: That is an unrealistic weight lifting schedule for 99% of women.) They still won't look very masculine. Very well toned, but not very masculine. My advice when women raise this concern: "If you get too big, just ease off. Maintaining is way easier than growing."
It's been done. It doesn't matter that you can't see the abs on 50% of the women on the Olympic team. Some think they'll get the physique of a professional body builder who's been abusing steroids for a decade anyway.
Anecdotally, I have never heard this sentiment from other women I know. That doesn't mean they aren't _thinking_ it, though. Maybe it also depends on location - where I live it is very common for both men and women to do some form of strength training.
I've been lifting weights on and off for over a decade and although I do have visible abs, that's more by nature of low body fat percentage than lifting. The point is - no matter how hard I train, I've never even gotten close to what I would consider as "too big" for my preference. Even as your muscle mass increases, the end result just seems to be a more _compact_ and efficient look rather than "bulky" in any sense of the word.
> Women are also more likely to regularly perform cardio/aerobic exercises, which can reduce bone density when done in excess and without adequate nutrition.
What is the biological mechanism behind this statement?
Elevated cortisol (in response to the stress of running or whatever) increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth. This isn't necessarily an issue for anyone doing lots of cardio, but it's an increase in risk. It also reduces protein synthesis, which is important for both muscle and bone (it isn't just calcium).
> Elevated cortisol (in response to the stress of running or whatever) increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth
Cortisol is also released during strength training, though.
Seems like a real issue is low impact cardio, which isn't negative for bone density (as far as I can tell) but does have a theoretical opportunity cost when you could be doing weight-bearing cardio, which does improve bone density.
Agreed with littlestymaar's comment higher up, though, that exercise rates being what they are, the theoretical opportunity cost may be quite theoretical.
The previous post was referring to the overall bone density change. The skeletal loading from strength training is a stronger signal for bone density increase vs the negative impact on bone density from increased cortisol production.
> Elevated cortisol … increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth
Would that also be true for caffeine consumption? IIRC it increases cortisol levels, but I don't really know much about what else it does, I've only read the Wikipedia page and gone "Wow, I'm really glad I've already cut back".
What you said about caffeine worried me somewhat, so I looked it up on Wiki and what I found about it was mostly innocuous and some properties are even beneficial, it's even on WHO's list of essential medicines.
Many vegetables have much more dangerous compounds and toxins: oxalic acid (a rust remover and bleach that can rot your kidneys) in rhubarb and Popeye's spinach and many other green-leaf vegies, solanine in potatoes, and very dangerous cancer-causing aflatoxins in peanut butter, and that's just the beginning, there are many dozens more! Now you know, are you going to starve?
And to boot, caffeine is a nice looking heterocyclic purine-like molecule with a six and a five-member ring both heavily laden with nitrogen, so what's the worry about? What's not to like about it?
It’s really not indicative of much at all. They also spout off about artificial sweeteners despite a complete lack of scientific evidence. It’s a political organization, not a scientific one.
"""Consumption of 1–1.5 grams […] per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism.[141] Caffeinism usually combines caffeine dependency with a wide range of unpleasant symptoms including nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations after caffeine use."""
"""cases of very high caffeine intake (e.g. > 5 g) may result in caffeine intoxication with symptoms including mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, disinhibition, delusions, hallucinations or psychosis, and rhabdomyolysis."""
1-1.5g. Who do you know consumes 10 to 15 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest very few.
>5g. Now, who do you know consumes more than 50 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest none.
If you scaled up oxalic acid daily doses in the same ratio as for the caffeine example then in the first instance the person would almost undoubtedly have kidney stones. In the second example the person would be dead. Right, at that dose Popeye's spinach meal would almost certainly have killed him.
At least the 'caffeinated' person, whilst off his head, would likely be still alive.
Even water has a LD50 rating. As millions attest, caffeine is one of the safer less harmful chemicals that plants use to defend themselves with. Almost every other organic molecule that plants use to ward off insects is more toxic.
Here's a few we actually eat:
www.mashed.com/1299947/most-dangerous-vegetables/ There are tens of thousands of others that you'd want to keep well away from, Nux vomica, Manchineel, Death caps, Atropa belladonna, etc. By comparison, in the danger stakes, caffeine doesn't even get off the starting block.
> Who do you know consumes 10 to 15 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest very few.
Me in 2009, by dose, as a result of constantly increasing my consumption and ending up at multiple tablespoons (not teaspoons) of instant per cup and nothing else but coffee as daily fluid intake.
Hence being glad I'd already cut back by the time I'd read about the impact of too much.
They warned us in school about the dangers of tobacco and alcohol (and all the illegal drugs*), but nobody ever said "there is such a thing as too much caffeine".
There is, and the unlimited free coffee in most workplaces turns out to be a problem for me.
* regarding your point about LD50 water, school also lied about the dangers of Ecstasy. Leah Betts' actual cause of death was water overdose, but she was the literal poster-child for the anti-drugs campaign in my time.
"…school also lied about the dangers of Ecstasy. Leah Betts' actual cause of death was water overdose, but she was the literal poster-child for the anti-drugs campaign in my time."
In the wash-up I reckon our views are likely closer to each other than it first seems. I agree completely with you being indignant about being lied to at school.
The whole matter of drug education I reckon is in an unholy mess. However, it's difficult to blame anyone in particular because there are so many factors involved and almost every one of them is complicated by multiple factors. I don't envy anyone involved in setting policy in this area.
There are social and moral issues involved not to mention that both schools and parents often have little factual knowledge about drugs, drug taking, addiction, and likely most have no personal experience of drugs having never taken them, etc. This itself is a major problem.
Thus, often the information they impart to kids comes more from emotion than from actual fact. This often misleading information is also the source of why there are so many views and why it's so difficult to reach a common agreement or consensus.
No doubt both teachers and parents want to keep their kids safe, so they'll tell kids what they think is necessary whether it's correct or not, and they'll do so without due consideration or whether it's prudent to even raise certain matters.
Therefore, it's sort of understandable that teachers, schools and parents lie to kids about such matters. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that lying to kids doesn't pay off as in the long-term it has negative consequences (and I'd reckon that's especially so when it comes to information about drugs).
In my opinion, misinforming kids is a serious matter for whatever reason.
My views and opinions about this go back a long way and owe their origins to an incident that happened when I was very young. (Fortunately it wasn't about drugs because there weren't† any around when I was growing up decades ago, we kids were very lucky in that regard.)
The incident occurred before I'd started school when my mother took me to see a matinee and during the newsreel there was a news clip about cancer and cancer research. Later when I asked her about it, so as not to worry me she told me that cancer was a very rare disease and that I'd never have to worry about it. She also failed to tell me that one of her sisters died of cancer before I was born. So a woman who would have been my aunt died of the disease. Now that's damn close to home I reckon.
It all unraveled a couple of years later when I was about 7 or 8 when I was on holidays at my grandmother's place. Her next-door neighbor was dying of lung cancer and it was my grandmother who told me so—not my mother. That's when I found out my mother had lied to me. I never mentioned to my mother what my grandmother had told me—and I've never forgotten that I was lied to.
We adults almost always underestimate how intelligent kids really are and the moment they get a whiff that they've been hoodwinked is the moment when mistrust first sets in. In my opinion that's really bad, especially so early on because the earlier things are imprinted into kid's minds the harder they are to shift later.
Back to the matter of your sensitivity to caffeine, these issues arose again in another current story that you may be interested in under HN title A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee (it's not the actual story title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067616.
† Thus, we had no instruction about drugs at school except to be told that if we were caught smoking we'd be in trouble (especially so if anyone was caught doing so at school). And several were caught, they'd sneak off and smoke behind the toilet block down the end of the school yard. BTW, I wasn't one of them (and I don't smoke).
No doubt! 10 to 20 caffeine pills could be taken at once, my example was cups of coffee per day (rough estimate ≈100mg/cup). Taken over a day it would be better tolerated (but I'd still not consume that amount).
This is not accurate and is the result of a misinterpretation of the Women’s Health study of the 2000s. It’s much more complicated. The specific type of molecule matters.
There are various forms of HRT and not all cause an increase in cancer. It’s a shame that notion has stuck around when it could be so helpful for so many women: bone density, hot flashes, vaginal atrophy, etc.
They do tend to cause an increase in blood clots though. The risk is manageable in relatively fit women. In overweight/sedentary women that gets a bit harder to balance out.
> They do tend to cause an increase in blood clots though.
That risk factor is specific to the oral route, and/or conjugated equine oestrogens. Injections, patches etc. of synthesised oestrogens don't seem to have that problem. https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k4810
> Transdermal preparations were not associated with risk of venous thromboembolism, which was consistent for different regimens
I sit in a lot of doctor training sessions and the feelings on hrt have changed a lot in the last 5-10 years. It’s now well thought of and an acceptable risk. Apparently the quality of life improvement is huge compared to the relatively minor risk
I saw this recent video on a similar topic (prostate cancer and testerone/TRT considerations) [1], and bookmarked it for later. Not knowledgeable to speak further on it though.
If testosterone causes PC then men in their teens and 20s would be the most likely candidates to suffer from it. But PC is almost always a disease of old age .
Estrogen exposure is a significant risk factor for endometrial cancer, which most commonly occurs in post-menopausal women. It’s a cumulative effect, as are many other things.
Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.
It is my understanding that excess testosterone can take prostate cancer from „it grows so slowly you’ll die of something else first“ to something that kills you quickly.
What my doctor has told me, after attending a urology + prostate cancer conference, is to think of the prostate as a sponge that absorbs testosterone. And once the sponge overflows, prostate cancer can be triggered.
But once cancer has occurred, adding more testosterone doesn't matter because the sponge is already super-saturated.
In fact, doctors who have this perspective will permit men with prostate cancer to continue testosterone therapy.
My father was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and the first treatment was eradicating all testosterone from his body as the affected cells were "feeding" from it.
It's not a cure as they tend to find other ways to grow with time but testosterone does make it faster.
Of course there are many types of cancer so this may not be true for all prostate cancers.
No, nothing quite like HN (aggregator) exists that I've found, which is unfortunate. In this space a lot it seems most of the discussion happens on twitter, discord, or between blog posts and for the most part not in comment sections. Additionally med/bio is such a wide field I get the sense most people stick to their niche and struggle to keep up with that. However for news sites and latest:
We know microgravity is terrible for us but we don't have data on 1/3 gravity. We might be fine. Or maybe we'd be fine if we took this drug, did some weight training, and added twenty minutes of centrifuge every day.
For the trip, there are several ways we could set up spin gravity.
For more on this "we don't really have the data for anything" problem, a humorously approachable read is "A City On Mars" [0]. Also the "nobody knows how laws would work" and other interesting complications.
I just wanted to say, I really appreciate your tangent here. Space travel didn't come to my mind at all and your comment made me feel the tiny things contributing to larger stories, for a moment. Caught me weirdly off-guard.
Bone density loss in space is estimated at a loss of 1-2% of total bone density per month of microgravity exposure. The worst cases of terrestrial bone loss are around 5% of total bone mineral density per year.
In many ways it doesn't cancel out. On Mars, things weigh less but their mass is the same. So, for example, if you are walking on Mars at a normal Earth walking speed, and you bump your shin on something, the inertia of your leg as it hits the obstacle is just as great as the inertia of your leg on Earth. In general, a lot of the little physical interactions that you rely on bone strength to get through scale according to mass / inertia (and muscle strength), not weight.
You're ignoring the prime reason humans aren't going to travel to Mars anytime soon: radiation. Good luck getting there without accumulating a huge dose of hard radiation that gives you cancer. This is why we should be worrying about building human settlements on the Moon first: we can put them underground (for radiation shielding, plus other benefits like avoiding meteorites), and the travel time is so short that the cumulative radiation exposure is very low. 3 days of exposure to cosmic rays is very low compared to a year or so, or at best 6 months.
Once we have manufacturing capability on the Moon, we can build much larger ships that have some decent radiation shielding.
Of course, the low gravity causes a bunch more problems. But here again, with significant space- and Moon-based industry, we could build much larger ships with spin gravity. This doesn't help the people working on the Moon though, but at least here we could cycle them on and off the Moon every 6 months or so, since the trip is only 3 days, so they could come back to Earth and re-acclimate to 1g periodically.
Can't wait for breaking a hip at 80 to be a thing of the past. Bone health is also a contributor in life expectancy and health of a person altogether. I read a study if you can assure your bones are healthy you can assure your health longterm.
Is bone health like grip strength? Grip strength correlates with life expectancy because it is a good proxy for overall health, but if you just work on your grip strength you won't get much healthier.
Not entirely, for a pretty obvious reason: breaking a bone at an advanced age is not infrequently the beginning of the end. Not enough to make it primary (in other words, your point about bone density as a correlate rather than a determinate is basically correct), but enough that improving just bone health on a widespread basis should help with life expectancy as well.
Try googling this it is kind of interesting. Link between bone density and skin elasticity. You will find that the denser the bones the healthier the skin. We may find people who are 70 looking like they are 50.
It was a thing in the media a couple of years ago. Researchers noticed a strong correlation between grip strength and healthy life expectancy in the old, so there were lots of pointless articles published about improving your grip strength.
Just from memory, but it has a significant correlation to testosterone levels. Also, the disparity in grip strength is especially large between men and women, when compared to other strength indicators.
By all accounts seems like this is a cure to age related bone loss. Almost everyone suffers from age related bone loss of some degree. Would like love to hear news about commercialisation of this.
So long as its safe. Almost always, these things don't pan out... or at least the first molecular iteration. That's the primary reason medicine is so expensive.
> That's the primary reason medicine is so expensive.
My aim isn't to make a long thread out of the topic but: while I'd agree it's one reason, I'd dispute it's primary. Demand for medicine is pretty inelastic, meaning there is generally a lot of power on the supply side to set high prices. Then you have the dynamics between health insurers and providers, the burdens of regulation and liability for adverse effects, the tendency to focus research and marketing on novel [patentable] remedies over potentially cheaper ones, and the tendency to focus on remedy over prevention. It's fairly difficult to pick a primary reason.
The reason they have so much power on the supply side is that what they do is incredibly painstaking and expensive. I agree the system sucks.
Sublingual Toradol is available from pharmacies in Mexico. I fly to San Diego every five years, take the tram to the border and walk across to Tijuana to stock up. Toradol is an NSAID they give you via injection in the emergency room for chronic pain and headaches. By mouth it tends to cause GI bleeding worse than any other NSAID. A number of people died before they restricted the pill to five days consecutive use. Dissolving Toradol under your tongue bypasses the GI tract, making sublingual Toradol much safer. I carry a pill pack of four pills in my wallet, and having a pain medication as effective as morphine without sedation in my pocket at all times seriously improves my quality of life. There is something I can DO when my chronic pain flares up enough that it starts to get to me.
In the US the Sprix nasal inhaler is the functional equivalent of sublingual Toradol. I've read the research papers on both medications and I compared the charts for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics and... the curves are virtually identical. They have the same impact on the body, both delivery mechanisms are equally effective in safety terms.
Sublingual Toradol is generic - the original papers on it are from the 80s. The Sprix is a patented delivery mechanism... wait for it...
* A dose of subligual Toradol in a Tijuana pharmacy: $0.25
* A single dose Sprix nasal inhaler from a US pharmacy: $25 last I checked. Only indicated for severe migraines.
That's a price multiple of 100x, as in one hundred times for a functionally equivalent medication. Last time I went to Tijuana the murder rate had multiplied by 10x since the last time I was there, so I went to the pharmacy right at the border. The price per dose was $0.50 there, but its cheaper if you go downtown. It isn't a counterfeited medication, so you don't have to worry about that. I wish more pain patients had access to sublingual Toradol. If a drug company wanted to improve chronic pain care, they could fund clinical trials in the US and get the medication approved. It will never happen in the states. Pure greed is the ONLY reason.
Actually, there's a lot more research on sublingual Toradol since I last checked: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22sublingual+toradol%... See the sublingual film work? No reason for that instead of a pill except you can patent it. BOOM. BURN IT ALL DOWN.
I don't think we disagree but I find it interesting that you state: "...what they do is incredibly painstaking and expensive"
And later proceed to explain an example of two different patents based on a drug from the 80s improving nothing but changing just enough to patent it and sell it for 100x the generic.
I was wondering just about this, if hormone replacement therapy is really that safe, as one can imagine the natural drop in its levels with age may not necessarily be pathological itself, but a protection mechanism. Like the ageing body were an old boiler you can't just do a overhaul, so as the pipes rust, you turn the pressure down, to keep it operating it within a safe envelope. HRT then would be like an unwitting intern trying to improve the system by cranking the settings up back to the level of a brand new one.
Evolution doesn’t work this way. Everything that happens to an organism past the standard age range of reproduction has 0 effect on natural selection. There is no system affecting “graceful decline” of body systems in some protective way for things that happen past 35 in women and maybe 45 in men.
But yes, as a HRT user myself (age 38), I do see it as replacing the fluids in my car to make it operate like when it was peak tuned at age 22.
That is absolutely not true. Even genetic variants from your father that are not inherited by you still influence your chances of survival and how likely you are to pass your genes to an offspring. Imagine your dad has a rare genetic variant, which you don't inherit, that means he is likely to be dead by age 50. Your fitness will be lower as you will lack a father during your childhood.
See this famous study: The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes. Science, 359, 424-428 (2018). doi:10.1126/science.aan6877. The summary literally states:
"Genetic variants in parents may affect the fitness of their offspring, even if the child does not carry the allele. This indirect effect is referred to as genetic nurture. Kong et al. used data from genome-wide association studies of educational attainment to construct polygenic scores for parents that only considered the nontransmitted alleles."
What are your tested free-T levels after HRT? 500, 800, 1000? Age 38: That is pretty early, in my experience, unless you are using it as "HET" (hormone enhancement therapy) for bodybuilding -- basically, medical doctor-approved anabolic steroids.
Simplifying a lot, once you age, your cells have accumulated lots of genetic and epigenetic defects, so they are more likely to become cancerous if you let them divide quickly.
Besides, you have less lymphocytes looking for carcinogenic cells, as your immune system is older.
In my 20 mins of searching; it looks like it's CCN3 is produced by humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOV_(gene)) and presumably humans have the receptors for it as well - though I'm uncertain if the same effect in mice will translate to humans. Since naturally occurring genes and genetic sequences are not patentable even if they don't commercialize you could probably get a 3rd party to make it reasonably cheaply. So if it is found to work I wouldn't even worry about commercialization.
This is great. My mother had osteoporosis and I hope they come up with a therapy she can use!
However as a currently breastfeeding mother, I'm asked by doctors to take calcium supplements every day (I only remember it once a week or so), and they threaten me with future osteoporosis if I don't take it. But these researchers are saying that breastfeeding mothers' bones aren't affected despite calcium depletion?
Fwiw I've also read research that the bones are indeed affected (as measured by density) but they rebound after you stop breastfeeding. I remember that the most depletion happened in the lumbar region, and that the rebound didn't happen fully if there was "parity" (multiple kids).
The conventional wisdom and common recommendation is to supplement with calcium, but I saw at least one study stating that it is not necessary: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9584497/
I rather suspect that if you are already eating a diet deficient in calcium, breastfeeding may exacerbate the issue, and since the supplements tend to have a poor bioavailability, taking them even if you don't need to isn't going to be harmful. Eat a healthy balance of foods and you are probably fine.
I may have a nurse for a mother, but I am very much not a doctor.
> taking them even if you don't need to isn't going to be harmful
I think, the transporter for calcium is the same used for some other minerals. So, if you're not mindful (about timing), you may be competitively blocking the absorption of e.g. zinc, which is much more precious nutritionally - zinc is very important for immune function and healing, while deficiency is common.
Calcium supplements can cause constipation, which may be not very fun after giving birth... Not to mention the implications of (lack of) quality control in the supplement market, by proxy, for a rapidly developing human being. Which substances are part of the formulation, other than calcium salts? Does the adult portion of copper or X accumulate in a mother's milk?
Not saying, you shouldn't take calcium supplements. But really, any supplement can be harmful, if consumed without need or consideration. (Fun fact: Vitamin A supplementation increases lung cancer risk!)
My water supply appears to be flush with calcium - I have to poke my shower head's holes out every few months. I wonder if it's good for me or if it's in too large of excess. Would probably help if I remembered the vitamin D more often, since you need that to absorb the calcium.
You still need to provide calcium to the body to deploy to one's own bones. This hormone apparently directs that process. It can't do that in the absence of sufficient calcium, of course, so supplements still seem like a good idea.
My amnesia is somewhat intentional. Like some of the commenters here, I'm doubtful if I should really take it everyday. Just seems excessive? Did it during pregnancy ofc, and it's not like the early days of breastfeeding when you're making almost a liter a day (kiddo is 2.5 so while still BFing, it's not an important source of food), so idk. My grandmother had like 10 kids, breastfed them all and never had bone issues. My mother breastfed us v little (<6 months all together) and got osteoporosis. I'm not at all sure how well-supported this recommendation is.
If this works and becomes a common dental procedure I will be soooo happy. Every time I go to the dentist I ask them if anything like this is coming down the pipeline and they laugh...
“One of the remarkable things about these findings is that if we hadn’t been studying female mice, which unfortunately is the norm in biomedical research, then we could have completely missed out on this finding…”
Can you please share some evidence (peer-reviewed scientific research publications / clinical data) supporting this? Curious about the potential mechanisms.
Amazing! Can anyone hypothesize whether it could have adverse effect towards cancer cells? Im dealing with someone who has osteoporosis due to cancer treatment.
> To test the ability of the hormone to assist in bone healing, the researchers created a hydrogel patch that could be applied directly to the site of a bone fracture, where it would slowly release CCN3 for two weeks. In elderly mice, bone fractures don’t usually heal well. However, the CCN3 patch spurred the formation of new bone at the site of the fracture, contributing to youthful healing of the fracture.
So, uh, did this research involve breaking mice bones?
Absolutely, there is probably some jig to hold the mouse and do the break reliably in the same way each time. I knew a researcher that did research that involved killing newborn baby rabbits and he said that he hated that part of the job but kept reminding himself that he is working on a cure for very sick human children that currently had no hope of treatment. It was exploratory research so there was only a small chance of success and many years later there was success in a unrelated field so in the end his work was redundant - but he couldn't have known that at the time.
By my morals it's ok to kill animals for the benefit of humans, animals kill animals for sustenance and for now we are still a part of nature. In the future perhaps we won't need to and I'll happily support that. For now in order to get to that future we must do the unpleasant thing with an understanding that it should be not be done egregiously, gratuitously, or needlessly. Not for the sake of the animals, although that is a given, but for the sake of the humans involved in harming those animals as I think doing such things does take it's toll.
Unfortunately they were conscious, they were painful deaths and it was the experiment that killed them. They were not euthanized after the experiment which is more the norm. I was told there was no viable alternative to obtaining the data. I only found out because I was helping process the data and I asked where the data was from.
What I don't like is that the inefficiencies in science means that many, and perhaps most, of the experiments that are being done are probably unnecessary and only being done due to bureaucratic inertia. I lament the horrible state of science and the needless suffering that causes both humans and animals.
So on one hand I think it's possible to justify the what is in effect torture of animals if a case can be made that the science obtained from it could be worth it. On the other hand I don't think it's normally the case that this is true and science should do a better job in justifying this torture. If unable to then it should stop.
You know when they kill a mouse in the lab they call it a 'sarcrifice'. There's some harrowing stuff and I personally would probably not be able to do it.
I think most ppl who do it just happened to find themselves in a part of their academic career where they have little choice if they want to proceed.
Probably. And then giving the mice the superpowers of wolverine.
Everybody loves this when it happens to a human in a film, no matter how much radioactive spiders will be crushed. If this makes you feel better while watching your plaster dry, I would bet my money on that sedation was applied and, if that old mice is still alive, it feels now like a two months old heartthrob.
Stories of mice being used in gruesome experiments always give me a bit of moral outrage, but when there's one in my house I have no qualms about killing it with extreme prejudice. So, they should just round up all the home-invader mice for experimentation- my conscious would rest easier knowing they're all just repaying their debt to society
My recollection is that laboratory mice are a very tight family line with very well understood DNA (and behavior? maybe), so you would gain a lot of variability and thus lose scientific rigor and may need longer, more complicated tests.
According to the unsolicited email I regularly receive, there are already products on the market for making bones longer. And lasting all night, which would I guess make it significantly easier to get out of bed in the morning.
I'm missing something, what good are long bones, specifically? Seems to me strength is the most important parameter, especially in aging populations..?
Picturing octogenarians with disproportionately long arms and legs is hilarious. Beats shrinking in height from bone loss and the impacts of having a fall in your 80s.
Online dating seems miserable! Although the misery makes sense to me. It's a highly competitive arena with very low friction. It reminds me of using Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist. FBM is full of the worst, flakiest people to coordinate a transaction with. The added friction from CL cuts down of the number of drive-bys and lowballers somewhat.
* I met my first real partner online- but that was on MySpace pre-appification of everything. I haven't dated anyone I met online since, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here.
>It reminds me of using Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist. FBM is full of the worst, flakiest people to coordinate a transaction with. The added friction from CL cuts down of the number of drive-bys and lowballers somewhat.
Totally opposite of my experience when I was last using them. CL was absolutely full of scammers trying to send me cashier's checks for stuff. FBM had people who were real people, who actually came with cash to buy my stuff. FBM's UI was absolutely terrible, but it was worth it to avoid all the scamming on CL.
>Online dating seems miserable!
I met all my girlfriends on there in the past couple of decades. The latest one is working out wonderfully. Sure, there were some bad dates and some not-so-great people, but you'll get that anywhere.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the track record of billionaires throwing money at problems unrelated to how they made their billions is not great. Yachts are easy to buy, cancer cures and life extension technologies are not so easy to buy.
This becoming viable would do to high-status men what white lead makeup did to high status women in the 19th century. Being tall isn’t as important as being taller than average, so you’d create an arms race among those who could afford the treatment. Which itself would strengthen the association between being short and being poor. And we all know how this ends, with a 7 foot tall millionaires dying of heart attacks as their circulatory system doesn’t naturally scale with their height.
@dang or whoever: I want to protest the recent (as in, after it was originally posted) addition of "in mice" to the title of this thread. It turns a significant scientific discovery into something that seems tawdry and meaningless. Discoveries in mice involving novel biological mechanisms can be important for at least 3 reasons:
- The mechanisms discovered work exactly the same way in humans. This is not a long shot at all, as mice aren't that far from humans genetically and physiologically.
- The mechanisms work slightly different in humans, pointing us to different natural solutions to a problem.
- The mechanisms work entirely different in humans, pointing us to potentially-important evolutionary divergences (maybe the biology was improved on in humans).
In any of these instances, the findings remain important, and "in mice" just cheapens that. After all, this work was published in Nature, which is still one of the top journals in any research field. The folks running the journal may have their issues, but they're not all idiots.
The 'in mice' has become another talking point on 'the right', mainly to discredit science and 'studies' in general. And that all 'mice' based studies are false.
It is the main talking point of the Weinstein brothers on their podcast. But their main thrust is not the reasonable list of points by the OP, the Weinstein point is that all mice studies are meaningless junk science and don't mean anything.
So, the 'in mice' has become a moniker for 'bad science' from those on 'the right'.
More to the point, it's a gendered difference, in mice and likely in humans also.
“One of the remarkable things about these findings is that if we hadn’t been studying female mice, which unfortunately is the norm in biomedical research, then we could have completely missed out on this finding,”
Many people understand that results in mice indicate similar results in humans, those that don't are likely to misunderstand or dismiss work in other ways in any case.
I'm not sure if they tested on males but my understanding is that the hormone is produced by females but arguably could work on males too, just like with TRT where being biologically female doesn't deprive of the testosterone effects.
That's because people assume that research is done on humans, if the sample species is not specified. Wouldn't it be dishonest to exploit that assumption?
This is great. But, the root of the problem for most postmenopausal women is simply the lack of estrogen. You need estrogen to make bone. Men and women do. Men are mostly protected from osteoporosis because they convert testosterone to estrogen. Elderly men have more estrogen than postmenopausal women. Their levels go to near zero. It's a tragedy that more doctors don't recommend HRT for older women, at least some level of replacement, maybe not up to peak levels when they were younger. The lack of estrogen causes a lot of suffering.
When I was 32 I had a sudden cerebral spine fracture, I was diagnosed as having severe Osteoporosis(I was told my bones were like that of 80 year old); The doctors didn't bother much as I was living with Achondroplasia (Dwarfism) and they attributed everything to it.
I'm on bisphosphonate treatment (zoledronic acid), I've already had 5 of those injections and I recently learnt that it could lead to severe side effects and not that effective for treating Osteoporosis.
Meanwhile I underwent a genetic testing and the result came out as I have COMP8 mutation which leads to Multiple epiphyseal dysplasia or Pseudo-achondroplasia; Both of which affects bones to different extent and I have symptoms for both.
I'm now looking for treatments which can help improve my bone density or at-least prevent further deterioration, CCN3 looks really promising. I even started a project to monitor bone health using BMD (Dexa) reports[1] and to submit reports for research (I'm looking for researchers in this area).
1 in 3 women over the age of 50 years and 1 in 5 men will experience osteoporotic fractures in their lifetime, According to this article more than 200 million people worldwide suffer from osteoporosis but I feel investment in bone health research is not enough.
[1] https://bonehealthtracker.com/
Men are also more likely to do strength training, which also helps build bone density. Women are also more likely to regularly perform cardio/aerobic exercises, which can reduce bone density when done in excess and without adequate nutrition. Lack of estrogen is of course the root, but I think we can't dismiss behavior differences contributing to the effect. In my experience, many women do minimal to no strength training because they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine. Maybe this is a really bad idea to live by.
> many women do minimal to no strength training because they're worried that muscle tone will make them look masculine.
I've observed this as being a very widespread belief too, and it seems like we need to be giving women a better biology education or something, because holy shit is it wrong.
I guess it's more a misconception among the general non weight training public that this stuff is so easy you can basically develop a muscular, masculine body on accident.
For all but the youngest and most genetically blessed males it takes years of very specific diet and exercise regimes. Or steroids.
Whereas just adding some weighted squats into her routine will have immense health benefits for most women as well as making their body look more feminine and attractive.
Men could also stop policing women's bodies and activities. I have had my doctor tell me to do load-bearing exercises but I've also heard men mock not just masculine-looking women, but women who are interested in male-coded activities like weight lifting.
No one is "policing bodies and activities" here, sounds to me like you are just being oversensitive and trying to twist the discussion into one that hates on guys. This sort of coded misandry doesn't work on me anymore, it's so overused, many people have wised up.
So I will say it again: any woman who thinks she will accidentally develop a masculine physique is a fool. She has a poor understanding of weight training and the human body.
Just as any man who thinks he'll get that physique on accident is also a fool!
I wager more men like it than men who mock it. Sports Illustrated is popular for a reason, fit women being considered attractive is very mainstream. There will always be a few assholes that will mock anybody for anything, but what can anybody do about that?
You must have heard it already but you won’t turn into Arnold by doing bodyweight squats 3 days a week for a year. It will, however, shape your body and rearrange fat deposits into more conventionally attractive positions and I don’t think there’s anyone around saying that’s not attractive.
Far more men like women with good-looking fit bodies. It's a statistically insignificant minority that likes "fat women", so "men" overall aren't policing women's bodies to the point of influencing women to not go to the gym. It's largely women who do it to each other.
>It’s a statistically insignificant minority that likes “far women”
Well, I’m not sure if that’s true, many men like “curvy” women, but generally even they are regularly working out. It would be more accurate to say that men dislike unhealthy women. But then you could say the same thing about men.
> heard men mock.., women who are interested in male-coded activities like weight lifting.
This sounds like some really insecure men
Read of a study years ago that had postmenopausal wpmen do weight training - giving a dramatic 40% increase in bone density in 6 weeks IIRC the details.
It's not that frail people need to be inactive, but that inactivity causes frailty.
I'd like to see that, the studies I've seen show around 1-5% per year.
Is that trained or untrained? "Newbie gains" is a real thing, mostly caused by people going from a negative health state to a "normal" health state (or inactivity to basic activity).
I can see a rapid increase in untrained people but more marginal increases in trained people because of this.
I was under the impression newbie gains were more attributable to better neuromuscular and connective tissue adaptation rather than something that can lead to bone growth. You can gain like 2-4lbs of muscle per month in that phase, and a disproportionate amount of strength.
A 40% increase in bone density over 6 weeks sounds like someone’s DEXA scanner is broken. Bones just don’t change that quickly.
Is there a case of bone density being "too low" in some sense that can cause it to go up more quickly? Maybe it's not the bones themselves but something the DEXA scanner picks up that looks like bone growth?
https://brokenclipboard.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/media-cover...
It's been done. It doesn't matter that you can't see the abs on 50% of the women on the Olympic team. Some think they'll get the physique of a professional body builder who's been abusing steroids for a decade anyway.
Anecdotally, I have never heard this sentiment from other women I know. That doesn't mean they aren't _thinking_ it, though. Maybe it also depends on location - where I live it is very common for both men and women to do some form of strength training.
I've been lifting weights on and off for over a decade and although I do have visible abs, that's more by nature of low body fat percentage than lifting. The point is - no matter how hard I train, I've never even gotten close to what I would consider as "too big" for my preference. Even as your muscle mass increases, the end result just seems to be a more _compact_ and efficient look rather than "bulky" in any sense of the word.
The more you get to know athletes, the more you realize the reality of the physiques of both strength and endurance athletes.
The same applies to cardio, where the general population over-estimates the calories burned and imagines that all runners will become skeletons.
Steroids have a lot to answer for when it comes to perceptions around exercise in general.
> Women are also more likely to regularly perform cardio/aerobic exercises, which can reduce bone density when done in excess and without adequate nutrition.
What is the biological mechanism behind this statement?
Elevated cortisol (in response to the stress of running or whatever) increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth. This isn't necessarily an issue for anyone doing lots of cardio, but it's an increase in risk. It also reduces protein synthesis, which is important for both muscle and bone (it isn't just calcium).
> Elevated cortisol (in response to the stress of running or whatever) increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth
Cortisol is also released during strength training, though.
Seems like a real issue is low impact cardio, which isn't negative for bone density (as far as I can tell) but does have a theoretical opportunity cost when you could be doing weight-bearing cardio, which does improve bone density.
Agreed with littlestymaar's comment higher up, though, that exercise rates being what they are, the theoretical opportunity cost may be quite theoretical.
> Cortisol is also released during strength training, though.
more than compensated for by the compressive loading signals from lifting heavy.
How do compressive loading signals compensate for cortisol production? Seems like one is a nerve signal and the other is a hormone?
The previous post was referring to the overall bone density change. The skeletal loading from strength training is a stronger signal for bone density increase vs the negative impact on bone density from increased cortisol production.
> Elevated cortisol … increases bone resorption and inhibits bone growth
Would that also be true for caffeine consumption? IIRC it increases cortisol levels, but I don't really know much about what else it does, I've only read the Wikipedia page and gone "Wow, I'm really glad I've already cut back".
""Wow, I'm really glad I've already cut back"."
What you said about caffeine worried me somewhat, so I looked it up on Wiki and what I found about it was mostly innocuous and some properties are even beneficial, it's even on WHO's list of essential medicines.
Many vegetables have much more dangerous compounds and toxins: oxalic acid (a rust remover and bleach that can rot your kidneys) in rhubarb and Popeye's spinach and many other green-leaf vegies, solanine in potatoes, and very dangerous cancer-causing aflatoxins in peanut butter, and that's just the beginning, there are many dozens more! Now you know, are you going to starve?
And to boot, caffeine is a nice looking heterocyclic purine-like molecule with a six and a five-member ring both heavily laden with nitrogen, so what's the worry about? What's not to like about it?
Being on WHO's list of essential medicines is no indicator of how innocuous a substance is.
It’s really not indicative of much at all. They also spout off about artificial sweeteners despite a complete lack of scientific evidence. It’s a political organization, not a scientific one.
I'm sorry you missed the point.
Re-reading your comment, I think you're the one who missed mine.
I said "cut back" not "cut out".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overdose
"""Consumption of 1–1.5 grams […] per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism.[141] Caffeinism usually combines caffeine dependency with a wide range of unpleasant symptoms including nervousness, irritability, restlessness, insomnia, headaches, and palpitations after caffeine use."""
"""cases of very high caffeine intake (e.g. > 5 g) may result in caffeine intoxication with symptoms including mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, disinhibition, delusions, hallucinations or psychosis, and rhabdomyolysis."""
1-1.5g. Who do you know consumes 10 to 15 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest very few.
>5g. Now, who do you know consumes more than 50 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest none.
If you scaled up oxalic acid daily doses in the same ratio as for the caffeine example then in the first instance the person would almost undoubtedly have kidney stones. In the second example the person would be dead. Right, at that dose Popeye's spinach meal would almost certainly have killed him.
At least the 'caffeinated' person, whilst off his head, would likely be still alive.
Even water has a LD50 rating. As millions attest, caffeine is one of the safer less harmful chemicals that plants use to defend themselves with. Almost every other organic molecule that plants use to ward off insects is more toxic.
Here's a few we actually eat: www.mashed.com/1299947/most-dangerous-vegetables/ There are tens of thousands of others that you'd want to keep well away from, Nux vomica, Manchineel, Death caps, Atropa belladonna, etc. By comparison, in the danger stakes, caffeine doesn't even get off the starting block.
> Who do you know consumes 10 to 15 cups of coffee per day consistently? I'd suggest very few.
Me in 2009, by dose, as a result of constantly increasing my consumption and ending up at multiple tablespoons (not teaspoons) of instant per cup and nothing else but coffee as daily fluid intake.
Hence being glad I'd already cut back by the time I'd read about the impact of too much.
They warned us in school about the dangers of tobacco and alcohol (and all the illegal drugs*), but nobody ever said "there is such a thing as too much caffeine".
There is, and the unlimited free coffee in most workplaces turns out to be a problem for me.
* regarding your point about LD50 water, school also lied about the dangers of Ecstasy. Leah Betts' actual cause of death was water overdose, but she was the literal poster-child for the anti-drugs campaign in my time.
"…school also lied about the dangers of Ecstasy. Leah Betts' actual cause of death was water overdose, but she was the literal poster-child for the anti-drugs campaign in my time."
In the wash-up I reckon our views are likely closer to each other than it first seems. I agree completely with you being indignant about being lied to at school.
The whole matter of drug education I reckon is in an unholy mess. However, it's difficult to blame anyone in particular because there are so many factors involved and almost every one of them is complicated by multiple factors. I don't envy anyone involved in setting policy in this area.
There are social and moral issues involved not to mention that both schools and parents often have little factual knowledge about drugs, drug taking, addiction, and likely most have no personal experience of drugs having never taken them, etc. This itself is a major problem.
Thus, often the information they impart to kids comes more from emotion than from actual fact. This often misleading information is also the source of why there are so many views and why it's so difficult to reach a common agreement or consensus.
No doubt both teachers and parents want to keep their kids safe, so they'll tell kids what they think is necessary whether it's correct or not, and they'll do so without due consideration or whether it's prudent to even raise certain matters.
Therefore, it's sort of understandable that teachers, schools and parents lie to kids about such matters. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that lying to kids doesn't pay off as in the long-term it has negative consequences (and I'd reckon that's especially so when it comes to information about drugs).
In my opinion, misinforming kids is a serious matter for whatever reason.
My views and opinions about this go back a long way and owe their origins to an incident that happened when I was very young. (Fortunately it wasn't about drugs because there weren't† any around when I was growing up decades ago, we kids were very lucky in that regard.)
The incident occurred before I'd started school when my mother took me to see a matinee and during the newsreel there was a news clip about cancer and cancer research. Later when I asked her about it, so as not to worry me she told me that cancer was a very rare disease and that I'd never have to worry about it. She also failed to tell me that one of her sisters died of cancer before I was born. So a woman who would have been my aunt died of the disease. Now that's damn close to home I reckon.
It all unraveled a couple of years later when I was about 7 or 8 when I was on holidays at my grandmother's place. Her next-door neighbor was dying of lung cancer and it was my grandmother who told me so—not my mother. That's when I found out my mother had lied to me. I never mentioned to my mother what my grandmother had told me—and I've never forgotten that I was lied to.
We adults almost always underestimate how intelligent kids really are and the moment they get a whiff that they've been hoodwinked is the moment when mistrust first sets in. In my opinion that's really bad, especially so early on because the earlier things are imprinted into kid's minds the harder they are to shift later.
Back to the matter of your sensitivity to caffeine, these issues arose again in another current story that you may be interested in under HN title A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee (it's not the actual story title): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067616.
I've made several posts here but the one that's probably the most relevant to you is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076191
__
† Thus, we had no instruction about drugs at school except to be told that if we were caught smoking we'd be in trouble (especially so if anyone was caught doing so at school). And several were caught, they'd sneak off and smoke behind the toilet block down the end of the school yard. BTW, I wasn't one of them (and I don't smoke).
1 gram of caffeine is 10 to 20 caffeine pills. Nobody does this without knowing they've got a problem.
No doubt! 10 to 20 caffeine pills could be taken at once, my example was cups of coffee per day (rough estimate ≈100mg/cup). Taken over a day it would be better tolerated (but I'd still not consume that amount).
This may be true, but it's not really relevant. Most people don't do training at all, especially past 50 yo, where bone density declines in women.
(And that's a significant issue in itself)
Estrogen replacement increases the risk of cancer in women.
This is not accurate and is the result of a misinterpretation of the Women’s Health study of the 2000s. It’s much more complicated. The specific type of molecule matters.
Citation.
Breast cancer dropped with a step function when HRT was stopped in general for meopausal women.
I haven't seen any studies to the contrary.
Did a quick search and found this one: https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/risk-of-breast-cancer-with...
Could be worth a look? I didn't dive into the study itself, but it seems decent at a glance.
There are various forms of HRT and not all cause an increase in cancer. It’s a shame that notion has stuck around when it could be so helpful for so many women: bone density, hot flashes, vaginal atrophy, etc.
They do tend to cause an increase in blood clots though. The risk is manageable in relatively fit women. In overweight/sedentary women that gets a bit harder to balance out.
> They do tend to cause an increase in blood clots though.
That risk factor is specific to the oral route, and/or conjugated equine oestrogens. Injections, patches etc. of synthesised oestrogens don't seem to have that problem. https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k4810
> Transdermal preparations were not associated with risk of venous thromboembolism, which was consistent for different regimens
Don't eat your HRT: rub it on your gums!
I sit in a lot of doctor training sessions and the feelings on hrt have changed a lot in the last 5-10 years. It’s now well thought of and an acceptable risk. Apparently the quality of life improvement is huge compared to the relatively minor risk
Although I knew a woman who had breast cancer and a consequence was taking her off HRT. Which she was dreading.
When I reach my elder years, I would happily undergo a preemptive mastectomy in exchange for stronger bones that would let me stay mobile for longer.
I saw this recent video on a similar topic (prostate cancer and testerone/TRT considerations) [1], and bookmarked it for later. Not knowledgeable to speak further on it though.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiVCsm4dNh0
If testosterone causes PC then men in their teens and 20s would be the most likely candidates to suffer from it. But PC is almost always a disease of old age .
Estrogen exposure is a significant risk factor for endometrial cancer, which most commonly occurs in post-menopausal women. It’s a cumulative effect, as are many other things.
Not a comment on the parent post, just highlighting that biology is not so straight forward.
It is my understanding that excess testosterone can take prostate cancer from „it grows so slowly you’ll die of something else first“ to something that kills you quickly.
What my doctor has told me, after attending a urology + prostate cancer conference, is to think of the prostate as a sponge that absorbs testosterone. And once the sponge overflows, prostate cancer can be triggered.
But once cancer has occurred, adding more testosterone doesn't matter because the sponge is already super-saturated.
In fact, doctors who have this perspective will permit men with prostate cancer to continue testosterone therapy.
My father was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer and the first treatment was eradicating all testosterone from his body as the affected cells were "feeding" from it. It's not a cure as they tend to find other ways to grow with time but testosterone does make it faster.
Of course there are many types of cancer so this may not be true for all prostate cancers.
> . It's a tragedy that more doctors don't recommend HRT for older women, at least some level of replacement
Once you get on this your only options are 1. use till you die 2. stop and face consequences of suppressed natural estrogen production from HRT.
Is that right?
"Use it till you die" seems like less and less of a penalty the older you get.
Is their natural estrogen production not already suppressed from menopause?
sure but wouldn't HRT suppress whats remanning? Otherwise you are just getting free biological lunch.
I’m no expert but I don’t believe it’s similar to testosterone in that it could be suppressed for life after doing replacement therapy.
Is there a good HN equivalent specifically for science/med/bio news? I do find interesting papers here on the topic although it's not the core focus.
No, nothing quite like HN (aggregator) exists that I've found, which is unfortunate. In this space a lot it seems most of the discussion happens on twitter, discord, or between blog posts and for the most part not in comment sections. Additionally med/bio is such a wide field I get the sense most people stick to their niche and struggle to keep up with that. However for news sites and latest:
https://endpts.com/
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/
https://www.statnews.com/
https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=news-and-views
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/trending/
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/ - you can filter it by field
If this sub is the state of modern science, we are in a lot of trouble.
Reddit isn't the state of anything in the real world, it's a bubble.
Pretty big bubble
Wait till the bots "fully" take over.
https://www.science.org/
https://www.eurekalert.org/
https://phys.org/
This will incidentally be helpful to space travel to Mars and living there.
Among the dozen other serious health problems with zero/low gravity like oh serious eye problems, humans sadly aren't going to Mars anytime soon.
Then again this would need to be tested on the moon or in orbit first, might not make a difference even with the hormone.
(vitamin K2 might help too)
We know microgravity is terrible for us but we don't have data on 1/3 gravity. We might be fine. Or maybe we'd be fine if we took this drug, did some weight training, and added twenty minutes of centrifuge every day.
For the trip, there are several ways we could set up spin gravity.
For more on this "we don't really have the data for anything" problem, a humorously approachable read is "A City On Mars" [0]. Also the "nobody knows how laws would work" and other interesting complications.
[0] https://www.acityonmars.com/
I just wanted to say, I really appreciate your tangent here. Space travel didn't come to my mind at all and your comment made me feel the tiny things contributing to larger stories, for a moment. Caught me weirdly off-guard.
Bone density loss in space is estimated at a loss of 1-2% of total bone density per month of microgravity exposure. The worst cases of terrestrial bone loss are around 5% of total bone mineral density per year.
One step closer to being able to make Belters.
If you lose 10 per cent of your bone density on the way to Mars, but then live in the conditions of 0.33 G, doesn't it cancel out?
The real nasty problem would be getting back to Earth.
In many ways it doesn't cancel out. On Mars, things weigh less but their mass is the same. So, for example, if you are walking on Mars at a normal Earth walking speed, and you bump your shin on something, the inertia of your leg as it hits the obstacle is just as great as the inertia of your leg on Earth. In general, a lot of the little physical interactions that you rely on bone strength to get through scale according to mass / inertia (and muscle strength), not weight.
I'm expecting mice will do the job. Why else is research centered about them?
You're ignoring the prime reason humans aren't going to travel to Mars anytime soon: radiation. Good luck getting there without accumulating a huge dose of hard radiation that gives you cancer. This is why we should be worrying about building human settlements on the Moon first: we can put them underground (for radiation shielding, plus other benefits like avoiding meteorites), and the travel time is so short that the cumulative radiation exposure is very low. 3 days of exposure to cosmic rays is very low compared to a year or so, or at best 6 months.
Once we have manufacturing capability on the Moon, we can build much larger ships that have some decent radiation shielding.
Of course, the low gravity causes a bunch more problems. But here again, with significant space- and Moon-based industry, we could build much larger ships with spin gravity. This doesn't help the people working on the Moon though, but at least here we could cycle them on and off the Moon every 6 months or so, since the trip is only 3 days, so they could come back to Earth and re-acclimate to 1g periodically.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/explorers-will-fac...
Can't wait for breaking a hip at 80 to be a thing of the past. Bone health is also a contributor in life expectancy and health of a person altogether. I read a study if you can assure your bones are healthy you can assure your health longterm.
Is bone health like grip strength? Grip strength correlates with life expectancy because it is a good proxy for overall health, but if you just work on your grip strength you won't get much healthier.
No, because if you break a hip, you lose a ton of mobility, which will cause an avalanche of problems.
Not entirely, for a pretty obvious reason: breaking a bone at an advanced age is not infrequently the beginning of the end. Not enough to make it primary (in other words, your point about bone density as a correlate rather than a determinate is basically correct), but enough that improving just bone health on a widespread basis should help with life expectancy as well.
Try googling this it is kind of interesting. Link between bone density and skin elasticity. You will find that the denser the bones the healthier the skin. We may find people who are 70 looking like they are 50.
That sounds like they're both correlated with oestrogen levels.
What is so special about grip strength? I never heard anything about this before your post.
It was a thing in the media a couple of years ago. Researchers noticed a strong correlation between grip strength and healthy life expectancy in the old, so there were lots of pointless articles published about improving your grip strength.
Just from memory, but it has a significant correlation to testosterone levels. Also, the disparity in grip strength is especially large between men and women, when compared to other strength indicators.
Wasn’t the best contributor to life expectancy vascular & endothelial health?
By all accounts seems like this is a cure to age related bone loss. Almost everyone suffers from age related bone loss of some degree. Would like love to hear news about commercialisation of this.
So long as its safe. Almost always, these things don't pan out... or at least the first molecular iteration. That's the primary reason medicine is so expensive.
> That's the primary reason medicine is so expensive.
My aim isn't to make a long thread out of the topic but: while I'd agree it's one reason, I'd dispute it's primary. Demand for medicine is pretty inelastic, meaning there is generally a lot of power on the supply side to set high prices. Then you have the dynamics between health insurers and providers, the burdens of regulation and liability for adverse effects, the tendency to focus research and marketing on novel [patentable] remedies over potentially cheaper ones, and the tendency to focus on remedy over prevention. It's fairly difficult to pick a primary reason.
The reason they have so much power on the supply side is that what they do is incredibly painstaking and expensive. I agree the system sucks.
Sublingual Toradol is available from pharmacies in Mexico. I fly to San Diego every five years, take the tram to the border and walk across to Tijuana to stock up. Toradol is an NSAID they give you via injection in the emergency room for chronic pain and headaches. By mouth it tends to cause GI bleeding worse than any other NSAID. A number of people died before they restricted the pill to five days consecutive use. Dissolving Toradol under your tongue bypasses the GI tract, making sublingual Toradol much safer. I carry a pill pack of four pills in my wallet, and having a pain medication as effective as morphine without sedation in my pocket at all times seriously improves my quality of life. There is something I can DO when my chronic pain flares up enough that it starts to get to me.
In the US the Sprix nasal inhaler is the functional equivalent of sublingual Toradol. I've read the research papers on both medications and I compared the charts for pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics and... the curves are virtually identical. They have the same impact on the body, both delivery mechanisms are equally effective in safety terms.
Sublingual Toradol is generic - the original papers on it are from the 80s. The Sprix is a patented delivery mechanism... wait for it...
* A dose of subligual Toradol in a Tijuana pharmacy: $0.25
* A single dose Sprix nasal inhaler from a US pharmacy: $25 last I checked. Only indicated for severe migraines.
That's a price multiple of 100x, as in one hundred times for a functionally equivalent medication. Last time I went to Tijuana the murder rate had multiplied by 10x since the last time I was there, so I went to the pharmacy right at the border. The price per dose was $0.50 there, but its cheaper if you go downtown. It isn't a counterfeited medication, so you don't have to worry about that. I wish more pain patients had access to sublingual Toradol. If a drug company wanted to improve chronic pain care, they could fund clinical trials in the US and get the medication approved. It will never happen in the states. Pure greed is the ONLY reason.
Actually, there's a lot more research on sublingual Toradol since I last checked: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22sublingual+toradol%... See the sublingual film work? No reason for that instead of a pill except you can patent it. BOOM. BURN IT ALL DOWN.
I don't think we disagree but I find it interesting that you state: "...what they do is incredibly painstaking and expensive"
And later proceed to explain an example of two different patents based on a drug from the 80s improving nothing but changing just enough to patent it and sell it for 100x the generic.
Yes, the trick will be to prevent too much growth and therefore the appearance of rogue mutants that may lead to e.g. osteosarcoma.
Lots of organs in the body lack regeneration capabilities once you age as an evolutionary mechanism to avoid tumors.
Uri Alon's book Systems Medicine has lots of models to explain those differences depending on e.g. organ size.
I was wondering just about this, if hormone replacement therapy is really that safe, as one can imagine the natural drop in its levels with age may not necessarily be pathological itself, but a protection mechanism. Like the ageing body were an old boiler you can't just do a overhaul, so as the pipes rust, you turn the pressure down, to keep it operating it within a safe envelope. HRT then would be like an unwitting intern trying to improve the system by cranking the settings up back to the level of a brand new one.
Evolution doesn’t work this way. Everything that happens to an organism past the standard age range of reproduction has 0 effect on natural selection. There is no system affecting “graceful decline” of body systems in some protective way for things that happen past 35 in women and maybe 45 in men.
But yes, as a HRT user myself (age 38), I do see it as replacing the fluids in my car to make it operate like when it was peak tuned at age 22.
That is absolutely not true. Even genetic variants from your father that are not inherited by you still influence your chances of survival and how likely you are to pass your genes to an offspring. Imagine your dad has a rare genetic variant, which you don't inherit, that means he is likely to be dead by age 50. Your fitness will be lower as you will lack a father during your childhood.
See this famous study: The nature of nurture: Effects of parental genotypes. Science, 359, 424-428 (2018). doi:10.1126/science.aan6877. The summary literally states:
"Genetic variants in parents may affect the fitness of their offspring, even if the child does not carry the allele. This indirect effect is referred to as genetic nurture. Kong et al. used data from genome-wide association studies of educational attainment to construct polygenic scores for parents that only considered the nontransmitted alleles."
What are your tested free-T levels after HRT? 500, 800, 1000? Age 38: That is pretty early, in my experience, unless you are using it as "HET" (hormone enhancement therapy) for bodybuilding -- basically, medical doctor-approved anabolic steroids.
>Lots of organs in the body lack regeneration capabilities once you age as an evolutionary mechanism to avoid tumors.
why is this so?
Simplifying a lot, once you age, your cells have accumulated lots of genetic and epigenetic defects, so they are more likely to become cancerous if you let them divide quickly.
Besides, you have less lymphocytes looking for carcinogenic cells, as your immune system is older.
thanks
In my 20 mins of searching; it looks like it's CCN3 is produced by humans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOV_(gene)) and presumably humans have the receptors for it as well - though I'm uncertain if the same effect in mice will translate to humans. Since naturally occurring genes and genetic sequences are not patentable even if they don't commercialize you could probably get a 3rd party to make it reasonably cheaply. So if it is found to work I wouldn't even worry about commercialization.
I just want to buy it once by bones start to get retarded.
Does it do anything for connective tissue?
According to the article, that's the next thing they're going to test for.
This is great. My mother had osteoporosis and I hope they come up with a therapy she can use!
However as a currently breastfeeding mother, I'm asked by doctors to take calcium supplements every day (I only remember it once a week or so), and they threaten me with future osteoporosis if I don't take it. But these researchers are saying that breastfeeding mothers' bones aren't affected despite calcium depletion?
Fwiw I've also read research that the bones are indeed affected (as measured by density) but they rebound after you stop breastfeeding. I remember that the most depletion happened in the lumbar region, and that the rebound didn't happen fully if there was "parity" (multiple kids).
So idk. I hope their premise is correct.
The conventional wisdom and common recommendation is to supplement with calcium, but I saw at least one study stating that it is not necessary: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9584497/
I rather suspect that if you are already eating a diet deficient in calcium, breastfeeding may exacerbate the issue, and since the supplements tend to have a poor bioavailability, taking them even if you don't need to isn't going to be harmful. Eat a healthy balance of foods and you are probably fine.
I may have a nurse for a mother, but I am very much not a doctor.
> taking them even if you don't need to isn't going to be harmful
I think, the transporter for calcium is the same used for some other minerals. So, if you're not mindful (about timing), you may be competitively blocking the absorption of e.g. zinc, which is much more precious nutritionally - zinc is very important for immune function and healing, while deficiency is common.
Calcium supplements can cause constipation, which may be not very fun after giving birth... Not to mention the implications of (lack of) quality control in the supplement market, by proxy, for a rapidly developing human being. Which substances are part of the formulation, other than calcium salts? Does the adult portion of copper or X accumulate in a mother's milk?
Not saying, you shouldn't take calcium supplements. But really, any supplement can be harmful, if consumed without need or consideration. (Fun fact: Vitamin A supplementation increases lung cancer risk!)
Meat is a great source of bioavailable calcium.
is this true? Outside of seafood that's not what I'm seeing. Mostly dairy and plant-based foods have the most calcium [1]
[1] https://www.bonehealthandosteoporosis.org/patients/treatment...
That isn't a table of bioavailability.
My water supply appears to be flush with calcium - I have to poke my shower head's holes out every few months. I wonder if it's good for me or if it's in too large of excess. Would probably help if I remembered the vitamin D more often, since you need that to absorb the calcium.
Tip: vinegar does wonders (for shower heads, not absorption).
You still need to provide calcium to the body to deploy to one's own bones. This hormone apparently directs that process. It can't do that in the absence of sufficient calcium, of course, so supplements still seem like a good idea.
> (I only remember it once a week or so)
Yikes. How about one of those 7-compartment SMTWTFS pill boxes? Store it alongside your morning coffee supply.
My amnesia is somewhat intentional. Like some of the commenters here, I'm doubtful if I should really take it everyday. Just seems excessive? Did it during pregnancy ofc, and it's not like the early days of breastfeeding when you're making almost a liter a day (kiddo is 2.5 so while still BFing, it's not an important source of food), so idk. My grandmother had like 10 kids, breastfed them all and never had bone issues. My mother breastfed us v little (<6 months all together) and got osteoporosis. I'm not at all sure how well-supported this recommendation is.
I try to eat more yogurt/kefir instead.
Wonder if it would help teeth as well?
I don't know about this hormone, but human clinical trials for a tooth-regrowing drug will begin in September. It was successful in animal models.
https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-first-tooth-regrowing-dr...
If this works and becomes a common dental procedure I will be soooo happy. Every time I go to the dentist I ask them if anything like this is coming down the pipeline and they laugh...
Ah, bone healing juice.
It sounds like CCN3 (NOV) has widespread effects in the body. Also, this wikipedia page needs updating for this result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOV_(gene)
“One of the remarkable things about these findings is that if we hadn’t been studying female mice, which unfortunately is the norm in biomedical research, then we could have completely missed out on this finding…”
Imagine then how much we missed from male mice.
In young age mango fruit eaters get strong bones till old age or even death
Can you please share some evidence (peer-reviewed scientific research publications / clinical data) supporting this? Curious about the potential mechanisms.
Amazing! Can anyone hypothesize whether it could have adverse effect towards cancer cells? Im dealing with someone who has osteoporosis due to cancer treatment.
Probably promote cancer cell growth as well
> Scientists discover a new hormone that can build strong bones in mice
Why do they need strong bones in mice ? Biological weapons ?
So is it reasonable to assume that males who induce lactation will also produce this bone building maternal brain hormone?
If a person goes on eating mango fruit in the seasons his bones get stronger and that calcium harmones are triggered
In the medical world “Could” means you are step 2 of 100 to a released product
Just what we need, super strong mice!
Oh great, just what my cat wants: crunchier mice.
> To test the ability of the hormone to assist in bone healing, the researchers created a hydrogel patch that could be applied directly to the site of a bone fracture, where it would slowly release CCN3 for two weeks. In elderly mice, bone fractures don’t usually heal well. However, the CCN3 patch spurred the formation of new bone at the site of the fracture, contributing to youthful healing of the fracture.
So, uh, did this research involve breaking mice bones?
Absolutely, there is probably some jig to hold the mouse and do the break reliably in the same way each time. I knew a researcher that did research that involved killing newborn baby rabbits and he said that he hated that part of the job but kept reminding himself that he is working on a cure for very sick human children that currently had no hope of treatment. It was exploratory research so there was only a small chance of success and many years later there was success in a unrelated field so in the end his work was redundant - but he couldn't have known that at the time.
By my morals it's ok to kill animals for the benefit of humans, animals kill animals for sustenance and for now we are still a part of nature. In the future perhaps we won't need to and I'll happily support that. For now in order to get to that future we must do the unpleasant thing with an understanding that it should be not be done egregiously, gratuitously, or needlessly. Not for the sake of the animals, although that is a given, but for the sake of the humans involved in harming those animals as I think doing such things does take it's toll.
But, were the animals at least unconscious when the experiments (and preparations thereof) took place?
Anyway, if you've ever seen a cat play with a half-dead mouse you might change your previous opinion on these experiments.
On the other hand, this research might lead to people putting patches on their jaws to stop the cosmetic effects of ageing.
Ethics is a difficult discipline ...
Unfortunately they were conscious, they were painful deaths and it was the experiment that killed them. They were not euthanized after the experiment which is more the norm. I was told there was no viable alternative to obtaining the data. I only found out because I was helping process the data and I asked where the data was from.
What I don't like is that the inefficiencies in science means that many, and perhaps most, of the experiments that are being done are probably unnecessary and only being done due to bureaucratic inertia. I lament the horrible state of science and the needless suffering that causes both humans and animals.
So on one hand I think it's possible to justify the what is in effect torture of animals if a case can be made that the science obtained from it could be worth it. On the other hand I don't think it's normally the case that this is true and science should do a better job in justifying this torture. If unable to then it should stop.
You know when they kill a mouse in the lab they call it a 'sarcrifice'. There's some harrowing stuff and I personally would probably not be able to do it.
I think most ppl who do it just happened to find themselves in a part of their academic career where they have little choice if they want to proceed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mou...
Where is the monument to the Beef Cow?
Kansas City, MO, USA
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1003469,-94.5952033,3a,56.6y...
What is the backstory to that monument?
Here is another:
https://chicagostudies.uchicago.edu/back-yards/back-yards-un...
Everywhere. Cattle is a very popular topic of sculptures. Just to mention two from the top of my head:
This one is in Oxford: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bull_statue,_outside...
This one is in Budapest: https://www.kozterkep.hu/1005/boci-szobor
And of course there is that swiss artist who creates parades of cows around cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CowParade
> Where is the monument to the Beef Cow?
With or without monument, It always will have a very special place on my stomach.
Basically the entire United States.
I knew someone who had to conduct dozens of these "sacrifices" as part of her neuroscience PhD. She used a mouse-sized guillotine like this one:
https://www.wpiinc.com/var-2645-rodent-guillotine.html
Probably. And then giving the mice the superpowers of wolverine.
Everybody loves this when it happens to a human in a film, no matter how much radioactive spiders will be crushed. If this makes you feel better while watching your plaster dry, I would bet my money on that sedation was applied and, if that old mice is still alive, it feels now like a two months old heartthrob.
Stories of mice being used in gruesome experiments always give me a bit of moral outrage, but when there's one in my house I have no qualms about killing it with extreme prejudice. So, they should just round up all the home-invader mice for experimentation- my conscious would rest easier knowing they're all just repaying their debt to society
My recollection is that laboratory mice are a very tight family line with very well understood DNA (and behavior? maybe), so you would gain a lot of variability and thus lose scientific rigor and may need longer, more complicated tests.
Naw, they found mice that tripped while running, it’s that simple man.
Oh thank you, thank you...
Tell me about the rabbits again George.
key word elderly provides an alibi.
The billion dollar question: can this somehow help develop treatment for making bones longer?
No, once the epiphyseal plates close further growth of long bones is impossible. Only intervention during puberty can influence final adult height.
So feed it to kids!
According to the unsolicited email I regularly receive, there are already products on the market for making bones longer. And lasting all night, which would I guess make it significantly easier to get out of bed in the morning.
Reminds me of this article from a few years ago about guys getting leg-lengthening surgery: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/lifestyle/article/leg-lengthen...
I'm missing something, what good are long bones, specifically? Seems to me strength is the most important parameter, especially in aging populations..?
Height, dating marketplace. Status in general.
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2022-07-19/dating-apps-an...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/miriamfauzia/height-dat...
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/only-15-women-interest-58-...
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
Okay wow that's immediately obvious. Thanks... My mind got stuck at octogenarians growing absurdly long bones in the autumn of their lives
Picturing octogenarians with disproportionately long arms and legs is hilarious. Beats shrinking in height from bone loss and the impacts of having a fall in your 80s.
Online dating seems miserable! Although the misery makes sense to me. It's a highly competitive arena with very low friction. It reminds me of using Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist. FBM is full of the worst, flakiest people to coordinate a transaction with. The added friction from CL cuts down of the number of drive-bys and lowballers somewhat.
* I met my first real partner online- but that was on MySpace pre-appification of everything. I haven't dated anyone I met online since, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass here.
>It reminds me of using Facebook Marketplace vs Craigslist. FBM is full of the worst, flakiest people to coordinate a transaction with. The added friction from CL cuts down of the number of drive-bys and lowballers somewhat.
Totally opposite of my experience when I was last using them. CL was absolutely full of scammers trying to send me cashier's checks for stuff. FBM had people who were real people, who actually came with cash to buy my stuff. FBM's UI was absolutely terrible, but it was worth it to avoid all the scamming on CL.
>Online dating seems miserable!
I met all my girlfriends on there in the past couple of decades. The latest one is working out wonderfully. Sure, there were some bad dates and some not-so-great people, but you'll get that anywhere.
If everyone is 6 foot no one is. 7 foot would just become the new baseline.
Smh, these slenderman cosplayers are really going too far.
This is getting downvoted, but they only need to find one short, insecure billionaire to make this comment come true.
Bezos and Zuckerberg are both 5' 7" (170cm), interestingly enough.
Tom Cruise, too (or shorter... allegedly)
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the track record of billionaires throwing money at problems unrelated to how they made their billions is not great. Yachts are easy to buy, cancer cures and life extension technologies are not so easy to buy.
This becoming viable would do to high-status men what white lead makeup did to high status women in the 19th century. Being tall isn’t as important as being taller than average, so you’d create an arms race among those who could afford the treatment. Which itself would strengthen the association between being short and being poor. And we all know how this ends, with a 7 foot tall millionaires dying of heart attacks as their circulatory system doesn’t naturally scale with their height.
It's ok if you drink plenty of malk.
It's got vitamin R
Never heard of malk. Googling it just yields a brand.
https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/Malk
https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Malk
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S06E21/319051
A little of the Moloko Plus
"The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking."
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Triggering Paget’s disease in 3, 2,…
@dang or whoever: I want to protest the recent (as in, after it was originally posted) addition of "in mice" to the title of this thread. It turns a significant scientific discovery into something that seems tawdry and meaningless. Discoveries in mice involving novel biological mechanisms can be important for at least 3 reasons:
- The mechanisms discovered work exactly the same way in humans. This is not a long shot at all, as mice aren't that far from humans genetically and physiologically.
- The mechanisms work slightly different in humans, pointing us to different natural solutions to a problem.
- The mechanisms work entirely different in humans, pointing us to potentially-important evolutionary divergences (maybe the biology was improved on in humans).
In any of these instances, the findings remain important, and "in mice" just cheapens that. After all, this work was published in Nature, which is still one of the top journals in any research field. The folks running the journal may have their issues, but they're not all idiots.
Edit: wording.
> It turns a significant scientific discovery into something that seems tawdry and meaningless.
> Discoveries in mice involving novel biological mechanisms can be important [...]
If discoveries in mice can be important, then how does stating that they're in mice make them less important?
The 'in mice' has become another talking point on 'the right', mainly to discredit science and 'studies' in general. And that all 'mice' based studies are false.
It is the main talking point of the Weinstein brothers on their podcast. But their main thrust is not the reasonable list of points by the OP, the Weinstein point is that all mice studies are meaningless junk science and don't mean anything.
So, the 'in mice' has become a moniker for 'bad science' from those on 'the right'.
Because people have a tendency to automatically dismiss findings when they're said to be "in mice".
More to the point, it's a gendered difference, in mice and likely in humans also.
Many people understand that results in mice indicate similar results in humans, those that don't are likely to misunderstand or dismiss work in other ways in any case.I'm not sure if they tested on males but my understanding is that the hormone is produced by females but arguably could work on males too, just like with TRT where being biologically female doesn't deprive of the testosterone effects.
That's because people assume that research is done on humans, if the sample species is not specified. Wouldn't it be dishonest to exploit that assumption?
I would say it turns an OK headline into a more precise headline.
Yeah, and why do people always add "in mice" after reading a fortune cookie? It makes their predictions seem so much less serious.