Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fernly 3896 days ago
> 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...

2 comments

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.
>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!