Slashdot Mirror
Pattern Recognition Software Enables MS Blood Test
ProteomicsWizard writes "Using proteomic spectral pattern recognition software, scientists have described a way to diagnose Multiple Sclerosis from a blood sample. The technology is applicable to other diseases including various cancers. With the technology available for identifying uncureable diseases before they manifest themselves, would you want to know?"
Oh holy shit. I thought that was MS as in Microsoft.
I don't guess it would matter anyhow, my blood is Aqua.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
It goes without saying that early diagnosis and treatment will give you the best chances by far for the longest and healthiest survival.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
My first thought when I read the title. Guess that's a sign of too much Slashdot.
I know I'm not the only one who read that headline as "Microsoft Blood Test". Bah! Too much time on /.
Microsoft is testing blood now?
"With the technology available for identifying uncureable diseases before they manifest themselves, would you want to know?"
When a cure or treatment is available: usually yes.
If no cure or treatment is available things become a bit less clear, but what if by the time the illness manifests itself, a cure is available, but it's only effective prior to the first symptoms?
Sometimes ignorance kills.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
I would definitly want to know. That way, I could either get the best help as early as possible in order to extend my enjoyable life or, were the time left found to be short, quit my job and go on a bender.
But...
I would want strict legislation preventing corporations/insurance providers/employers from getting the results of said tests. You can't tell me with a straight face they wouldn't use such information in hiring/coverage decisions.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
So that's what they're calling it now.
I guess "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" was too much of a mouthful.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
I would feel so stupid if I had the opportunity to know what would kill me and not taken it and the opportunity to take steps to rectify it. Yes, MS is incurable, but "incurable" is only a measure of our current knowledge and ability, not an absolute. Also, some things such as cancer are measures of risk factors, and can be avoided by behaviour modification.
"Incurable" has a way of changing pretty quickly. Imagine, if you will, the amount of money which would be pumped into MS research if a sitting President found himself (or herself) on the road to developing it?
Knowledge is power.
HBH
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
"It looks like you're trying to perform an AIDS test. Would you like me to contact all your sexual partners for the past 5 years?"
This is a good prelminary result, but we know from experience with other blood tests for disease states that these tests have to be verified with many different types of healthy and sick groups of people before the test can be considered a good one. For example, is this really just a test for active myelin breakdown? There are urine tests for that already, and they have their problems with sensitivity and specificity.
;-).
That said, it would be nice to have a cheap, reliable blood test for MS (multiple sclerosis not Micro$oft)
Remember:
* MS == Microsoft
* MS == Multiple Sclerosis
* MS == Mississippi
All 3 of these require more education spending to combat evil.
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you could find out with high certainty that you would or would not get a particular disease, you would only buy insurance for those risks which apply to you (or low-deductible insurance; high-deductible would do for low probabilities). But when everyone is doing this, the odds of anyone buying insurance NOT making a claim would sink toward zero. Either the cost of insurance rises toward the cost of treatment, or the insurance company goes broke. You either stop being able to get insurance or having any reason to buy what's available (if you needed it, you'd be better off paying out of pocket and skipping the middleman).
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you learn you have this problem, then you can no longer check "no health problems" when applying for life insurance. Otherwise it's fraud -- if the insurer discovers it, they might not pay when you die.
It needs a fairly powerful computer, like IBM's 'deep blue', that finds out if you've got anything deadly (or other things, like MS) by running a simple screening test, it's known as the MS [Deep] Blue Screen[ing] of Death :-p
yeah that was tough...
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
a) corporations should be able to choose not to hire someone who's gonna die half way through their work, leaving them having to re-hire, re-train, etc etc.
b) insurance companies don't need the information. You sign something saying "I don't have any blah-blah" - if anything happens to you, and it turns out that you do have blah-blah, then your insurance in void... all of it... even if 'blah-blah' is cancer and you've just been hit by a car, you illegally signed a document, therefore, there is no contract.
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
"Please enter your product code, which is stored within your DNA. To do this, please place your finger into your CD/DVD drive, and JAM IT REALLY HARD!"
.torrent for my DNA string, jus' lemme know, works for 2000, XP Pro/Corp, and 2003 Advanced Server.
If anyone wants the
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The BANF site describes the technology as using "a complex mathematical processes and supercomputers to ensure the highest level of accuracy and quality control." Do any in the /. community believe that a complex mathematical process and supercomputers actually ensure quality control?
'Scuse me while I puke.
Dammit, is there no sense of trying to do a public service without charging an arm and a leg just to be able to read that maybe, 10 years down the road after they and the FDA have seen to it that all the money they can milk out of the test proof has been spent, there maybe might be a test for it thats quick, simple and no more invasive than me checking my sugar?
I have no argument with paying for the product, and/or test materials, ever. The people who do the research really should be able to recoup the salaries and such for the people who actually develop this stuff.
But thats when they actually have a product, and not a second before.
To charge me 40 dollars + tax just to read the paper once, is IMO just plain greedier than Boss Hog ever thought on being.
If they want money thrown their way to finance the rest of the proof to the FDA, all those blind tests etc, then they should make the publicity they are trying to generate easy to get by making it freely readable so the victims can go lobby their congress critters while they still can for a bag of support money to facilitate the proof, or dis-proof as the case may be. To charge these folks $40 for a word of hope is IMO, downright criminal and I hope St. Peter keeps the gates tightly locked when its their turn.
Where am I coming from?
Easy, I watched a first cousin lay in a bed living on a IV drip for the last 20 years of her life. First diagnosed when she was about 22, lived to be 66 IIRC. Yes, she had a careing mother who, when she could no longer physically care for her as she neared her own 75th birthday, had the means to see to it she was properly cared for for the next 15 years until she finally passed, having spoken maybe 3 words in the last 20 years of her life and those with extreme amounts of effort. Trapped with an apparently sound mind in a body she couldn't control. For her it was not living, it was a living hell.
No one should profit from anothers misery before they have a product that has the potential of being helpfull.
--
No Cheers offered on this one, its too too maddening for words.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
To charge me 40 dollars + tax just to read the paper once, is IMO just plain greedier than Boss Hog ever thought on being.
no one's charging you anything. Just because the online version from the publisher's website costs, doesn't mean that you can't get access to the article for free. Just go to any decent college library and read it off the shelf. You can even spend 5 cents per page and take a copy home with you for less than a dollar. journals have to finance their publication somehow, and selling subscriptions is the way they do it (advertising leads to the realm of potential conflict of interest).
They give several reasons; the one that sticks out in my mind is that a positive test can tell you to start making the (emotional, financial, etc.) preparations for raising a "special needs" child.
My comment stands. The so-called press release is nothing more than advertising to me. Yes, potentially important data to those who are or may be so afflicted.
As advertising is a gamble on the future sales achievable by the product, I'll be damned if I'll pay to read what is nothing but advertizing and future conjecture.
And now I see that I'm not logged in, WTCF?
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.34% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
When I first read the headline of this article on the RSS feed, I was thinking that Microsoft had gotten into the blood market. :)
-- Mitch
Manzellanews.com
If you could find out with high certainty that you would or would not get a particular disease, you would only buy insurance for those risks which apply to you
Extremely doubtfull that any majority of people would take this approach. You assume people buy insurance only as a purely rational, non-emotional financial decision, and not for something more intangible like "peace of mind". I think the majority of people will still get the same insurance even if they know they're at low risk for heart disease, MS, etc. You can still obviously get in a car accident, slip in the shower, or get a disease you're at "low risk for" no matter what you do. I've seen time and time again that the majority of the population is just terrible at assessing low risk. In short a lot of health insurance is driven by fear, not risk. Fear is a lot harder to drive away than just a few tests.
Testing will only let the people who are at high risk for rare disease make sure they're covered for said diseases. How many of those people aren't covered now, but would be after they've tested as high risk for some horrible disease? That's the real question here. Insurance companies might try to require testing, but I suspect this requirement would become illegal rather quickly (if it isn't already). People are gullible for a lot of things, but there's A LOT of very paranoid people out there that don't trust health insurance companies one lick (and with good reason). There's a large amount of what a friend of mine refered to as "down home cynicism" when it comes to Insurance and health-care. With an aging boomer population this point only becomes more important.
AccountKiller
I know of a person, a neighbor kid in school who lived a few houses down - his mother had MS - real MS. It was a terrible thing to watch progress. I also know of another individual, who was diagnosed with it. I told him what I am going to tell you - the description fit him, he tried it, went back to the doctor, and they were baffled when his symptoms of MS had disappeared. Now - it could be a case of spontaneous remission, but he fit the profile, so he tried it, and it...worked? Who knows - but he is now better, which is what matters, right?
Enough - here is the issue: How much diet soda (or any other foods containing NutraSweet) does your girlfriend consume? If it is a lot, read on. If none or very little - I am sorry.
Basically, what it comes down to is wood alchohol poisoning (ultimately, poisoning by formaldahyde). How is this possible? Well, the process by which NutraSweet is made involves the use of wood alchohol as a solvent (look up the NutraSweet patent - the process is right there), which is then distilled off. However, the theory is that some of the molecules of the wood grain alchohol remains in the resulting NutraSweet. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem - until the NutraSweet is heated.
Whether by cooking (as in cakes or cookies containing it), or by the sun or a hot warehouse (pallets full of soda sitting behind the store, or in unrefrigerated trucks) - the molecules are driven out and then consumed. I think there is even postulation that body temperature alone might be enough to drive off the molecules...
The body then does the rest - converting the wood grain alchohol molecules into formaldahyde molecules, which slowly poisons the body, and interestingly enough causes symptoms which appear very similar (almost too similar) to MS...
As I said - I don't know how true this is, but I have heard way too many anecdotal stories about people having MS who drank a lot of Diet this or that, then stopped eating that food and got better "spontaneously". Some have said this is all a conspiracy raving rant - an urban legend or something. I haven't seen any documentation one way or the other to support the idea, so do some research on it if you want (google on "NutraSweet Poisoning" for a start - then drill down from there on the various information). Also, talk to your doctor(s) - see if they have any insights or opinions on the matter.
I do know this - if I was diagnosed with MS, and I knew I had been consuming large amounts of NutraSweet or Aspartame containing products - I would stop doing so immediately, and start drinking a ton of water to help "flush" my system. It is a small change to make that may help in the long run...
Finally - if this isn't the case for you and your girlfriend, I am sorry - but I wanted to make sure that you (and others) were aware of this theory/idea - in case it could help...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Protein biomarker analysis is still very much in its infancy, and while the results to date have been promising, the sample sizes have been small and the data quality frequently problematic.
For example, early protein biomarker datasets for ovarian cancer detection were a catalog of artefacts, and even today many analyses are run on datasets that have not had proper feature detection done on them. This results in the discovery of "patterns" that involve structures that are clearly non-physical (for example, peaks that are much narrower than the resolution of the apparatus.)
There are also fundamental difficulties with high false discovery rates when running pattern recognition software on these data. Statistically speaking, the question you are asking is: what are the odds that I can find N channels that a classification algorithm can use to distinguish class A from class ~A? When you have thousands of channels, and N is somewhere between 2 and 10, and you have only a few dozen samples, the a priori probability of being able to find a classifier is essentially unity.
So while I think this whole approach to disease is interesting, it is very likely that one could achieve similar results to the ones reported in this abstract even if the data were pure noise.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
...you guys really are scared! People going on a killing spree cuz they're going to die anyway? Maybe not being bought up in a gun culture is responsible for me not having even thought along those lines, not to mention the difference in terrorism perception and the spread of fear.
People who go round gunning people down, I doubt they really need an excuse, especially one like "damn, I'm wheelchair bound and have very little energy cuz I have MS, think I'm gonna kill lotsa people".
I'd really look into the way you think about the world, it's so far from healthy it's unbelieveable. And that attitude has consequences.
btw, what'ss the difference between what you're saying (you gotta give sick people money otherwise they'll kill) and them using said gun to hold up a bank? It's extorting money through fear either way.
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Your government and your media are your terrorists, they're the one's deliberately spreading the terror, and the american public lap it up. I don't understand what you mean about diverting money, diverting it to where? I agree it needs diverting, what's the proportion of money spend on the so called anti-terrorism compared to say, anti-drink-driving? If you compare how many each has killed in America over the past 5 years, the money becomes a joke.
:-p
When atoms get too big, they divide. When cells grow past a point, they split. The only way we survive is by parting with part of ourselves which grows itself to become a new person. Small is stable, growth without dividing can't work in a chaotic universe. America needs to split, and it will. It's too big, and the population want too different a things, for one government. They know, but they can hang on a bit longer while everyone's so scared.
As for the SUV comment, the inefficient things need to be smashed up anyway
-2A
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I mean diverting the anti-terrorism money to healthcare and a functional social safety net. That would do a great deal more for people's well being. The majority of the funds being spent on anti-terrorism are in reality just going towards expensive security theater so polititians can claim they are 'doing something' about 'the problem'.
I agree fully that the media and government here are the terrorists (we even have a color coded scale to tell us how terrified we 'should' be!). I have given up watching television news since it is not at all informative or accurate anymore. I do sometimes watch CBC news on satallite still. When the Daily Show wins a news award, you know there's a problem.
As for the SUV comment, the inefficient things need to be smashed up anyway :-p
Probably so. With the new $2/gal gas prices, I'm not thrilled but I'll bet the SUV owners are hurting now.