I believe that Vitamin D might protect against some cancers.
However, I do not agree that Vitamin D deficiency can be responsible for about 60% cancers.
Here are my reasons why:
1) The process of carcinogenesis (initiation of the first DNA mutation/ adduct required to form cancer to the stage of clinically overt disease) in most cases takes more than 4 years. This clinical trial is only 4 years and too premature to reach to conclusions.
2) I have yet to read the paper, but it is necessary to know whether this trial was truly randomized meaning that the those who got the Vitamin D pill and those who got the placebo were similar to each other in all other ways. It is possible that if it is not randomized, a healthier cohort of people chose to take Vitamin D for a long time.
3) It is also important to know how they treated those people who dropped out of taking the Vitamin D pills. It is possible that unhealthier people dropped out and then we were comparing all subjects in the placebo group to the "healthier" people in the Vitamin D group.
4) A risk reduction of 60% (= relative risk of 0.4) is epidemiologically very strong and if that was the case, we would have already found such a role of Vitamin D much earlier (like 30 years before or so). There is something called Bradford Hill's criteria for causation in epidemiology which has strength of association as one of the criteria. The rationale for that is if we had a confounder which is actually responsible for the effect, we would have known it before because it is more likely to have a stronger effect. The same principle goes here. We do not know anything that could prevents so many types of cancer with such great attributable fraction. The magnitude of effects of like 2.5 or reduction of risk to 0.4 were the strengths we used to see in the papers of 1970s. Hence I think there could be some issues with the study design and data analysis of this study if they found such a great magnitude of effect.
Having said that I think that Vitamin D might prevent many cancers, but I expect a lower magnitude of the effect.
A lot of private firms have identified disease susceptibility genes. There is a company in Iceland called 'deCode' - http://www.decode.com/ which has been doing this stuff for many years now, exploiting the fact the iceland has a relatively stable and homogenous genetic population. They have genetic data available for more than 25% of the population of Iceland and they have innumerable papers and free online resources.
Not to mention the federal govt. has been doing this forever now and 'Human Genome Project' and 'Hapmap project' are well known.
I have an access to the article and according to the authors:
The normal ants walk at average speed of 0.31 m/s Stumped ants walk at average speed of 0.14 m/s Stilted ants would be expected to walk faster. But their average speed was measured to be 0.29 m/s. They think its probably due to the increased weight of the glue and stilts.
So, your argument regarding the time taken to travel back is probably not true.
Furthermore, in their statistical modeling they adjusted for the speed of the ant among many other factors.
I am not trying to belittle the invention and am sort of happy that such a thing was made (in fact I knew about it at least 5 years ago).
However, as far as its applications for diagnostic or therapeutic purpose are concerned, they are very little. Most of the things in lumens in our body can be observed using putting an endoscopic tube (like a colonoscope or a flexible bronchoscope).
The advantages of an endoscope are 1) we can simultaneously remove a portion of the tissue for biopsy. 2) We can manipulate the camera to have a better look at the same thing from different angles. 3) The endoscope has multiple channels - one for the camera, others for pouring saline to clear the field (example to see the area if there is active bleeding and the blood obscures the view). Other channels can be used to insert tools for electro-coagulation or banding or putting a sclerosant to stop bleeding from a vein. 4) We can remove things like gall bladder stones in a procedure called ERCP.
All these things cannot be done using the pill.
So the applications of the pill is limited.
The best thing that the pill will be able to do, but what an endoscope cannot is to assess the normal peristaltic activity of our GI tract -- which means, how can the normal 'waves' of our stomach or intestine push objects like food. The rate at which the pill goes down, the portions where it meets resistance, etc. is important to know. To some extent we can do that not using an endoscope, but by giving barium or gastrograffin to the patient and asking him/ her to swallow it. However both those things are liquids (or semi-solid pastes). It is difficult to extrapolate in what way would a solid move, by giving the patient a liquid. Hence this pill, will help a lot as far as that is concerned. An example is given in the article. People suffering from diabetes have nerve endings which do not function well. As a result their gut does make the 'waves' properly and food gets stuck at a particular point. If the food does not move fast more of it will be absorbed (than normal). Hence if they have eaten something rich in carbohydrate, they will absorb more sugar (the last thing they need in the world!). There are many such movement disorders. This pill will help us identify or quantify those.
It has been known for a long time now that sleep deprivation helps drastically improve patients with severe depression. However, if the patient is not already on antidepressant drugs, he will relapse back into depression - http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/7/2/117
This has been true to some extent with electroconvulsive therapy too. People with severe depression become normal for a few days, but they ultimately need antidepressants.
I wonder whether deep brain stimulation can solve this issue of long term pharmacotherapy, or will it be just one of those overhyped discoveries, which is no better than the existing tools we have?
I think big companies like Microsoft (Melinda Gates Foundation) and Google have started to think that charity may be a means of marketing and would in a long term help to make some bucks out of it. I guess that works by 1) Constantly staying in headlines, by those charitable activities 2) The countries which these companies will impact, are the places who potentially have a large consumer market which is still not tapped. 3) They will work hand in hand with policy makers, etc. in those countries - and would be in a better position to influence them in their favor.
Lets consider the case of typhoid fever - Chloramphenicol is the most effective drug in the lab. However, when it comes to practical use it is replaced by fluoroquinolones and ceftriaxone because of the potential side effects. When Chloramphenicol was introduced half a century ago, it was widely hailed as a broad spectrum antibiotic and indiscriminately used. However, only after it was administered to millions of people its idiosyncratic dyscrasia (aplastic anemia) came to be known - considering the incidence between 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 25,000 when you treat one million people with chloramphenicol between 25 and 40 ppl will be expected to have the reaction. Such a rare, though lethal reaction, cannot have been predicted even by administering to 10,000 ppl (which is generally a sufficiently large study).
Secondly, I do not disagree that this is a stepping stone to further studies - read my first line "Without discounting their achievements............"
Finally, safety standards are very stringent for humans - not so much for pets. Hence, though I am not aware, Chloramphenicol as you say may be used more frequently in pets. But that is not the point of our discussion.
Without discounting their achievement, I would like to say that 21 people is very less a number to be satisfied about the safety of a drug. Lethal idiosyncratic aplastic anemia in chloramphenicol occurs in 1 in 25000 people, which was sufficient for this drug to be almost kicked out of the market (it is only used where all other drugs have failed).
Also, it is yet to be seen if side effects appear in the patients in the presence of Ebola virus, since all these subjects were not exposed to Ebola virus (ofcourse it is not ethical to do such an experiment, but we will come to know of that only after the vaccine comes out in the market - via Phase IV trials).
" Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. "
Infertile females are given ovulation inducing drugs and made to produce a lot of ova and each of them are fertilized and stored at very low temperatures, so that that if one in-vitro fertilization attempt fails, they do not have to go through the whole process again, rather just implant the fertilized ovum again.
Once this female has her child / children and needs no more children, these embryos are stored forever. These should be used to do stem cell research. by doing that you do not devalue the embryo, nor kill a human life. They should be allowed to be sold or at least made available for stem cell research. I see know point in " Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. "
To my knowledge DNA methylation cannot be reversed and DNA methylase has not been found to exist yet.
The only way DNA de-methylation at a particular CpG site in DNA can occur is by DNA replication(cell division), where replication of DNA gives an unmethylated CpG site.
This concept is not relatively new. Randomized clinical trials, involving trying to protect the brain, in surgeries like CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) are taking place for more than 10 years now. 5 years ago, a review of many such trials found that though stroke related deaths decreased by inducing hypothermia, they faced other non-stroke related mortality in operations and overall there was no difference between hypothermia and normothermia.
This article http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane/revabstr/AB002138 .htm goes over it in more detail. However, they don't go into the details of to what temperature was the hypothermia induced.
Since CABG is a preplanned procedure as opposed to trauma, I guess inducing hypothermia is different in both settings, and I hope we get some positive results in humans.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that Vitamin D might protect against some cancers.
However, I do not agree that Vitamin D deficiency can be responsible for about 60% cancers.
Here are my reasons why:
1) The process of carcinogenesis (initiation of the first DNA mutation/ adduct required to form cancer to the stage of clinically overt disease) in most cases takes more than 4 years. This clinical trial is only 4 years and too premature to reach to conclusions.
2) I have yet to read the paper, but it is necessary to know whether this trial was truly randomized meaning that the those who got the Vitamin D pill and those who got the placebo were similar to each other in all other ways. It is possible that if it is not randomized, a healthier cohort of people chose to take Vitamin D for a long time.
3) It is also important to know how they treated those people who dropped out of taking the Vitamin D pills. It is possible that unhealthier people dropped out and then we were comparing all subjects in the placebo group to the "healthier" people in the Vitamin D group.
4) A risk reduction of 60% (= relative risk of 0.4) is epidemiologically very strong and if that was the case, we would have already found such a role of Vitamin D much earlier (like 30 years before or so). There is something called Bradford Hill's criteria for causation in epidemiology which has strength of association as one of the criteria. The rationale for that is if we had a confounder which is actually responsible for the effect, we would have known it before because it is more likely to have a stronger effect. The same principle goes here. We do not know anything that could prevents so many types of cancer with such great attributable fraction. The magnitude of effects of like 2.5 or reduction of risk to 0.4 were the strengths we used to see in the papers of 1970s. Hence I think there could be some issues with the study design and data analysis of this study if they found such a great magnitude of effect.
Having said that I think that Vitamin D might prevent many cancers, but I expect a lower magnitude of the effect.
This is not the first time this has happened.
A lot of private firms have identified disease susceptibility genes. There is a company in Iceland called 'deCode' - http://www.decode.com/ which has been doing this stuff for many years now, exploiting the fact the iceland has a relatively stable and homogenous genetic population. They have genetic data available for more than 25% of the population of Iceland and they have innumerable papers and free online resources.
Not to mention the federal govt. has been doing this forever now and 'Human Genome Project' and 'Hapmap project' are well known.
I have an access to the article and according to the authors:
The normal ants walk at average speed of 0.31 m/s
Stumped ants walk at average speed of 0.14 m/s
Stilted ants would be expected to walk faster. But their average speed was measured to be 0.29 m/s. They think its probably due to the increased weight of the glue and stilts.
So, your argument regarding the time taken to travel back is probably not true.
Furthermore, in their statistical modeling they adjusted for the speed of the ant among many other factors.
I am not trying to belittle the invention and am sort of happy that such a thing was made (in fact I knew about it at least 5 years ago).
However, as far as its applications for diagnostic or therapeutic purpose are concerned, they are very little. Most of the things in lumens in our body can be observed using putting an endoscopic tube (like a colonoscope or a flexible bronchoscope).
The advantages of an endoscope are
1) we can simultaneously remove a portion of the tissue for biopsy.
2) We can manipulate the camera to have a better look at the same thing from different angles.
3) The endoscope has multiple channels - one for the camera, others for pouring saline to clear the field (example to see the area if there is active bleeding and the blood obscures the view). Other channels can be used to insert tools for electro-coagulation or banding or putting a sclerosant to stop bleeding from a vein.
4) We can remove things like gall bladder stones in a procedure called ERCP.
All these things cannot be done using the pill.
So the applications of the pill is limited.
The best thing that the pill will be able to do, but what an endoscope cannot is to assess the normal peristaltic activity of our GI tract -- which means, how can the normal 'waves' of our stomach or intestine push objects like food. The rate at which the pill goes down, the portions where it meets resistance, etc. is important to know. To some extent we can do that not using an endoscope, but by giving barium or gastrograffin to the patient and asking him/ her to swallow it. However both those things are liquids (or semi-solid pastes). It is difficult to extrapolate in what way would a solid move, by giving the patient a liquid. Hence this pill, will help a lot as far as that is concerned. An example is given in the article. People suffering from diabetes have nerve endings which do not function well. As a result their gut does make the 'waves' properly and food gets stuck at a particular point. If the food does not move fast more of it will be absorbed (than normal). Hence if they have eaten something rich in carbohydrate, they will absorb more sugar (the last thing they need in the world!). There are many such movement disorders. This pill will help us identify or quantify those.
They were cut off from light for so many years and 'de-evolved' their eyes.
It has been known for a long time now that sleep deprivation helps drastically improve patients with severe depression. However, if the patient is not already on antidepressant drugs, he will relapse back into depression - http://apt.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/7/2/117
This has been true to some extent with electroconvulsive therapy too. People with severe depression become normal for a few days, but they ultimately need antidepressants.
I wonder whether deep brain stimulation can solve this issue of long term pharmacotherapy, or will it be just one of those overhyped discoveries, which is no better than the existing tools we have?
Let me move to Mozilla.
I think big companies like Microsoft (Melinda Gates Foundation) and Google have started to think that charity may be a means of marketing and would in a long term help to make some bucks out of it. I guess that works by
1) Constantly staying in headlines, by those charitable activities
2) The countries which these companies will impact, are the places who potentially have a large consumer market which is still not tapped.
3) They will work hand in hand with policy makers, etc. in those countries - and would be in a better position to influence them in their favor.
Lets consider the case of typhoid fever - Chloramphenicol is the most effective drug in the lab. However, when it comes to practical use it is replaced by fluoroquinolones and ceftriaxone because of the potential side effects. When Chloramphenicol was introduced half a century ago, it was widely hailed as a broad spectrum antibiotic and indiscriminately used. However, only after it was administered to millions of people its idiosyncratic dyscrasia (aplastic anemia) came to be known - considering the incidence between 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 25,000 when you treat one million people with chloramphenicol between 25 and 40 ppl will be expected to have the reaction. Such a rare, though lethal reaction, cannot have been predicted even by administering to 10,000 ppl (which is generally a sufficiently large study).
Secondly, I do not disagree that this is a stepping stone to further studies - read my first line "Without discounting their achievements............"
Finally, safety standards are very stringent for humans - not so much for pets. Hence, though I am not aware, Chloramphenicol as you say may be used more frequently in pets. But that is not the point of our discussion.
Without discounting their achievement, I would like to say that 21 people is very less a number to be satisfied about the safety of a drug. Lethal idiosyncratic aplastic anemia in chloramphenicol occurs in 1 in 25000 people, which was sufficient for this drug to be almost kicked out of the market (it is only used where all other drugs have failed).
Also, it is yet to be seen if side effects appear in the patients in the presence of Ebola virus, since all these subjects were not exposed to Ebola virus (ofcourse it is not ethical to do such an experiment, but we will come to know of that only after the vaccine comes out in the market - via Phase IV trials).
" Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. " Infertile females are given ovulation inducing drugs and made to produce a lot of ova and each of them are fertilized and stored at very low temperatures, so that that if one in-vitro fertilization attempt fails, they do not have to go through the whole process again, rather just implant the fertilized ovum again. Once this female has her child / children and needs no more children, these embryos are stored forever. These should be used to do stem cell research. by doing that you do not devalue the embryo, nor kill a human life. They should be allowed to be sold or at least made available for stem cell research. I see know point in " Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. "
To my knowledge DNA methylation cannot be reversed and DNA methylase has not been found to exist yet. The only way DNA de-methylation at a particular CpG site in DNA can occur is by DNA replication(cell division), where replication of DNA gives an unmethylated CpG site.
...understand 98% of patents.
This concept is not relatively new. Randomized clinical trials, involving trying to protect the brain, in surgeries like CABG (Coronary artery bypass graft) are taking place for more than 10 years now. 5 years ago, a review of many such trials found that though stroke related deaths decreased by inducing hypothermia, they faced other non-stroke related mortality in operations and overall there was no difference between hypothermia and normothermia. This article http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane/revabstr/AB002138 .htm goes over it in more detail. However, they don't go into the details of to what temperature was the hypothermia induced.
Since CABG is a preplanned procedure as opposed to trauma, I guess inducing hypothermia is different in both settings, and I hope we get some positive results in humans.
By then, we will also have a few more planets added to the solar system, like Xena.