[Uptrenda]

It's hard not to exaggerate the implications of this study if fungal infection does turn out to be the cause of AD given how huge this would be for humanity. Just off the top of my head I can say this disease has effected my family (1 set of grandparents effected by this disease so far) so I'd like for the conclusion to be correct.

I guess the next step would be testing the hypothesis with more people with AD to see if it holds up and then somehow getting approval to do drug trials (and I'm sure there will be no shortage of volunteers.) I can almost see a clamouring of families trying to get their hands on anti-fungal drugs in the future in the hope that it helps their loved ones but we simply won't know if this will help until there's more data.

Hoping for a break through. It's certainly not without precedent that we find something extremely simple / obvious that turns out to be the key. On a side note: it's interesting to think that the crack pots you see writing about candidas infections being the cause of numerous hard-to-treat illnesses -might- actually be right (in a sense.)

[chetanahuja]

The discovery, if corroborated by others, could indeed be huge but I'm afraid it wouldn't open up new treatment options anytime soon. Fungal infections inside the body are really really hard to treat in the first place. Add to that the blood-brain barrier which makes it very hard to treat any type of infection in the brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier#Fu...

Combination of these two factors sadly means that short of major breakthroughs in fungal antibiotic research or in drug delivery to the brain, Alzheimer is not likely to suddenly become more treatable even if the fungal infection theory proves to be true.

[kevinalexbrown]

First, there are antifungal drugs that pass the BBB, with varying efficacy:

https://www.medicine.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/domfiles/i...

Second, antifungals have positively affected AD-like symptoms, though possibly through misdiagnosis.

[chetanahuja]

I should have put a disclaimer that I'm not a doctor or expert in pharmaceutical research by any means but unfortunately have had to learn a fair bit about fungal infections the hard way due to a loved one having been affected. Antifungal treatments for internal infections are long (of the order of years), can be difficult to administer (some of them can only be done via IV) of uncertain efficacy and can have serious side effects. And this is for organs that don't have to overcome the BBB.

Nonetheless, if some anti-fungal treatments do prove to be effective against alzheimer's it'll be an amazing advance in medicine. Probably at the level of a Noble prize for the researchers. I'd love to see that happen.

[et2o]

It's known to be pretty difficult to treat a lot of fungal infections in the CNS. The agents we have are pretty nasty, with severe side effects.

[kevinalexbrown]

totally - but if you can effectively treat a substantial percentage, that's huge. And some effective antifungals have what many consider tolerable in the face of AD.

[solofounder7]

I'm a hacker not a doctor but I've done some research into water purification, and here is what I've learned:

The body is mostly water. The task of removing microorganisms and fungus from water has been well studied.

Science knows of effective agents which are proven to purify water of micro-organisms like bacteria and also fungus. Some of these are being utilized in public water decontamination, and others while also effective are not used because they are less cost efficient to produce.

Water purifying agents have a varying range of effectiveness and also and a varying range of toxicity to the human body. There are a couple of agents in particular however which are both well tolerated by the body and are also remarkably effective at decontaminating water.

The one which my research indicates leads the pack in this area is a white crystalline salt named Potassium Iodide, KI. KI has been used widely by both the military and by campers in portable water decontamination.

A solution of Potassium Iodide in water (known colloquially as Iodine) was a leading and apparently very effective drug during the 19th century in the United States. There are doctors today who prescribe milligram doses of KI (many many times more than the RDA) to treat a wide array of ailments but especially in dermatology. They do not typically see serious side effects although they do frequently recommend monitoring thyroid levels while utilizing higher doses.

[cstross]

"Airliners are mostly aluminum. Aluminum has well-understood properties, including flight. So if an airliner stops flying we can fix it by filtering out whatever impurity was responsible."

Sounds nonsensical to you? Good. Because that's about how reasonable your "the body is mostly water" thesis sounds to someone with a biomedical background.

[manarth]

This argument seems to be that "The body is mostly water. The task of removing X from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove X from the body". This seems to be a logical fallacy.

Let me rephrase this argument as: "The body is mostly water. The task of removing HIV from water has been well studied. Therefore it's easy to remove HIV from the body".

Just to be clear: I have no medical expertise, this is mere conjecture. But fungal infections could perhaps persist in various cells. In neurons. In spoor form. In all sorts of manifestations, where they wouldn't be affected by the same treatment that disinfects water. I don't have any expertise to say one way or the other, but I suspect that if there were a simple solution such as "just treat with Iodine, it'll kill the fungus", this discussion wouldn't be taking place.

[kibibu]

A quick injection of Easy Off Bam! Mould Killer should fix 'em right up.

[hamami]

you cannot just decontaminate your body, the human body relies on beneficial microorganisms to function. without them you'd die

[solofounder7]

Remarkably KI is gentle on the body while still doing a great job purifying water of the most common foul bacteria and fungus.

This seems like it would make no sense until you stop to consider that idea that in earlier generations of man we ate on average a lot more marine plants than we do today (kelp in particular) which are rich in Potassium Iodide. People ate kelp because it was a "low hanging fruit" so to speak, easily harvested in great quantity from the sea. Perhaps the beneficial organisms in our gut evolved to tolerate KI so that populations could tolerate eating mostly seaweed.

The Japanese still eat a lot of kelp (the average japanese male ingests more than 40mg of KI daily from seaweed), and if you crunch the statistics it looks like they may have significantly less AD among their population than we do in the west: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alzheimers...

[kragen]

Potassium iodide is not iodine; it is a compound of iodine, with the same relation to iodine that table salt (sodium chloride) has to chlorine gas, which is a chemical weapon. In fact, both potassium iodide and sodium chloride are alkali halides, compounds of the halogens iodine and chlorine, respectively. Iodine is extremely reactive and consequently toxic, not only to people, but even more so to bacteria, which is why it is useful in disinfecting water. Tincture of iodine typically contains both potassium iodide and elemental iodine, but it's the elemental iodine that does the work.

Iodine, on contact with electron donors, will rapidly reduce them and ionize to the same nontoxic iodide found in potassium iodide, rendering it nearly harmless. However, oxidizing your body cells causes chemical burns by killing them; oxidizing bacteria and fungi kills their cells too. Pure iodine will blister your skin on contact.

Essentially your optimism arises from confusing two related, but very different, substances. Don't feel bad; I've made similar errors any number of times. One out of every ten thousand times that you think you've found an easy way to hack around a difficult and important problem, it's a breakthrough. The other 9,999 times, you're overlooking a fundamental reason your idea won't work.

It's deeply unfortunate that HN is not the kind of place that people will correct your mistakes, as I've done above, instead of silently downvoting you.

If you are using CNS stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidate, modafinil, cocaine, maybe even caffeine) you might want to cut down your dosage. The hyperfocus they facilitate can be counterproductive when it causes you to overlook your errors and get overexcited over a possible breakthrough. This can blossom into full-blown amphetamine psychosis, which is not an experience I recommend, especially for the people around you.

A useful tool in discovering errors like this is investigating consequences that would ensue should your reasoning turn out to be true. For example:

* Potassium iodide is a chemical that people have been dosed with many times, including soldiers under controlled conditions. If it cured everything from jock itch to acute bacterial meningitis, probably someone would have noticed.

* Bottles of iodine are labeled "for external use only". If it were nontoxic, it would not be labeled in this way.

* Many potassium iodide vendors and customers are enthusiastic promoters of colloidal silver, which actually is a broad-spectrum antimicrobial that is fairly nontoxic to human bodies. (By itself, it's not effective enough to disinfect water with, but in combination with the more toxic copper, ionized silver has been used to disinfect water.) If KI were effective for disinfection, they would be promoting it as such.

* Our bodies use iodide in certain thyroid hormones, so there are enzymes devoted to moving iodide ions around, keeping them from reacting with the wrong things, etc. This is different from e.g. lead, mercury, or tellurium, which have no known biological function and cause toxicity by acting as poor substitutes for other atoms. If iodide were nontoxic and effective at stopping fungal infections, we would have evolved to concentrate it in our bodies and direct it to areas suffering from inflammation. But we didn't.

[seesomesense]

Eat a kilogram of potassium iodide and see what happens.

SPOILER: . . . . . You will die of hyperkalaemia

[shostack]

Would the recent discovery of lymphatic tubes going into our brains[1] be a potential area of focus for potential treatment?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9647253

[gus_massa]

The article is not 100% clear, but I think the flux in the lymphatic tubes goes from the brain to outside, as in the other organs. So it will not be useful to send medicine inside the brain.

The article describe an alternative theory for Alzheimer

> In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain. We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.

[melling]

Could you be more specific about the timeline? I remember when people said there was nothing that could ever be done for people with HIV. My guess is that if you know a precise cause, you'll have some basic treatments within a decade and an effective "cure" within two decades.

[Retra]

According to your link, there is a possibility that some cases of Alzheimers are caused by a degraded blood-brain barrier, which might also allow for fungal infections to take hold more readily.

[andrewtian]

Coconut oil seems to have benefits in Alzheimer's patients [1]. It also has anti-fungal properties. Worth a look.

[1] http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_alternative_treatments...

[Nano2rad]

There is no need for drugs to cross blood-brain barrier. If antifungal treatment is effective, drugs can be delivered directly to brain although that may need new series of research.

[tim333]

>clamouring of families trying to get their hands on anti-fungal drugs in the future in the hope that it helps their loved ones but we simply won't know if this will help until there's more data.

It may not be so hard to get data - try anti-fungals and see if the patients get better. There are plenty of patients and the drugs could be tried in countries other than the US. It could be possible to get data in a few weeks rather than years of trials.

There seem to be about a dozen anti-fungals at the moment which could be tried. Presumably the best choice would depend on which fungi was involved. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381184

[fernly]

> try anti-fungals and see if the patients get better

I got the impression that the disease symptoms result not from the mere presence of the fungus, but from progressive damage over a long time. So, if you don't start to treat until there are symptoms, you could kill the fungus and at best, the person would not get worse. Which is not to be dismissed, but...

[tim333]

It's hard to know till you try it but the experiment seems easy to do and reasonably low risk - the risk from anti-fungals is probably less of a worry than dying from Alzheimer's. So it seems worth giving it a shot even if the probabilities of success are low. The nervous system seems to have some recovery abilities, more from retraining surviving neurons than growing new ones.

[coldtea]

>So, if you don't start to treat until there are symptoms, you could kill the fungus and at best, the person would not get worse. Which is not to be dismissed, but..

It's "not to dismissed"? It's the difference between life and death!