'Bad' Protein Linked to Numerous Health Problems 217
nbahi15 writes "A report in the July 13th edition of the online Journal of Clinical Investigation has linked the aP2 protein to asthma and several other diseases. It also suggests a connection between the metabolic and immune systems and these diseases." From a related Forbes article: "To study the effects of aP2, the researchers created genetically engineered mice that could not produce the protein. 'They're metabolic supermice,' Hotamisligil said. 'We cannot make them obese, diabetic or atherosclerotic. They don't develop fatty liver disease, and they don't develop asthma.' In mice with an animal model of asthma, the researchers found that aP2 regulated the infiltration of inflammatory molecules into the lungs."
Bad aP2Ps. (Score:4, Funny)
Prions? (Score:2)
Re:Prions? (Score:2, Informative)
No, it seems to me that these proteins are made by the body, while prions are infectious agents (though made entirely of protein themselves).
Re:Prions? (Score:2)
I would have never considered that. (Score:2)
Re:Prions? (Score:2, Informative)
My Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Question (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. This is the gene that prevents you from turning into a super mouse. For everyone except mice, that's a major positive effect.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
I don't think just because someone dies of a heart attack, or of cancer, that we can automatically assume they would have died that way 100 years ago. The food is not the same, read the ingredients. The water is not the same either, or t
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Old age? Do they put that on death certificates?
If you have a primitave understanding of medicine, and your king drops dead at the ripe old age of 60, what else are you going to say? They most certainly died of something, everyone does, it just gets more likely with every passing year.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
You're right! By god, where's the mold? Where's the rot? I can't believe i just ate meat and bread without life-sustaining rot!
Yes, there are a lot of things in the food we eat that are new. However, at least in America, everything sold as food has to go through a more rigid inspection system than ever happened in ancient times.
Huh? (Score:2)
I honestly think, that if you allow your food to go rotten then you should have salted it first and dried it. You act like ancient people were stupid or something, but it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out how long food will keep before going bad, or
Re:My Question (Score:2)
You DO know what causes aging in humans, right? The shortening of telomeres on our chromosomes, caused by errors in copying.. you got it.. proteins. You DO know what causes those errors, right? You got it... more proteins (and some free radicals and other toxins here and there, toxins which are becoming increasingly common I might add).
No, no they haven't. Obesity for our ancestors meant death, because a
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Let's also say, that you are wrong, heart attacks did not exist in the past, so while you are right being obese meant you werent as good of a hunter, you don't have to be a hunter because you are obese. so
mistaken over-simplification of evolution (Score:2)
No offense meant, but that (and the assumption that evolution is only relevant to reproductive age made by another poster) is actually false and a rather unfortunately common over-simplification of evolution. It presumes every gene must manifest in every individual during reproductive age and lead directly to reproduction to be of value. Not so.
Darwin and serious evolutionary biologists since have understood that's false; and in fact fails to explain the evol
Re:mistaken over-simplification of evolution (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
On an interesting note, allergies and asthema are related to high IQ. Coincidence?
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:2, Interesting)
One exerpt: 21. Like myopia, the higher one's intelligence, the more likely one is to be allergic to inhaled substances and, thus, to have asthma. For example, in the study of 2,720 gifted people conducted by this author, more than 80% of those who reported having asthma also had allergies; here, the gifted females were also far more likely than the males to have these disorders, and myopes were nearly twice as likely as non- myopes to have severe or multiple allergies (see se
Re:My Question (Score:5, Interesting)
The only conclusion that you can draw from their study, with respect to this particular topic (which, incidentally, is just a small sidenote in the study), is that there is a correlation between asthma and myopia and Mensa. That's a no-brainer, really. Mensa is self-selected for people whose primary interests are purely intellectual. Myopes and asthmatics are physically predisposed towards activies like those conducted by Mensa. Duh. They seem to have forgotten that there are many people, such as myself, who've posted scores that would allow them into Mensa, but decline to join because their interests lie in areas other than brainteasers and discussions.
You cannot draw statistically valid conclusions about an entire population by studying a self-selected subset of that population.
Re:My Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Supermetabolic mice will sound nice in the 21st century when everyone is trying to lose weight, and anyone going hungry isn't connected to the Internet. It sounds like 'too much metabolism', which would be terrible during the ice age when people went hungry and wanted to conserve energy.
Genetically engineer yourself without a2P and end up on a deserted island; you'll be the first to die. In many ways its similar to stapling your stomach, you'll need constantly more food. However you might also
Re:My Question (Score:2, Insightful)
As an ironic side effect, you just might also be the last.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
-- Gary Larson, "The Far Side"
The problem with this talk of evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
What lack of evolution? (Score:2)
If we can continue selecting for later childbirth and healthier parents for the next hundred years, we may see some real evolution at work.
Re:What lack of evolution? (Score:2)
that's not strictly true... (Score:2)
It is not strictly necessary that the mutation acts before reproduction.
Re:My Question (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, the whole fat==energy storage thingy.
Re:My Question (Score:5, Informative)
If these proteins are so bad, and so easy to genetically engineer out, then from an evolutionary standpoint, why do we have these genes?
The gene is linked to obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. Obesity has only become a problem within the last hundred years or so as we've become more sedentary and gotten access to more food. Heart disease has increased because of a recent increase in saturated and trans-fats in our diet. Also, heart disease tends to kill people after they've raised children, so after you've passed on your genes. The article doesn't specify which type of diabetes this protein is linked to, but type II diabetes is linked with obesity (see obesity), and simply old age (already raised kids). Asthma is mostly caused by pollution, and possibly an overly hygenic environment during childhood (though there's genetic risk factors of course) which are both recent phenomenon.
The point is that it could easily be that this protein hasn't posed a threat to us until very recently when our lifestyle has changed drastically. The gene that produces this protein wouldn't be eliminated if in the past it posed no threat to producing offspring and raising them to maturity.
Re:My Question (Score:5, Insightful)
For mammals, there is selection pressure well after offspring are produced. For humans in particular, far more children tend to survice until they themselves can reproduce if those children have good parenting. Alternately, this can be expressed as: People who die before they get their children raised to self sufficiency represent a bad trait that natural selection theoretically should put some pressure against. This probably is the explanaiton why humans are unusual among mammals in that they often live well past menopause ages, as even grand-parents or great grand-parents may be able to increase the survivability of subsequent generations.
However, there are some alternatives that help soften the selection process. A lot of human social institutions are developed to shift this load from biological parents to the rest of the species: Orphanages (obviously), but also schools, adoption/fosterage, and in some cultures, even military service (i.e. 11 year old tribal soldiers in places like Somalia or Riwanda). Probably even prehistoric humans had some of these institutions - for example there are Neandertal examples that show some seriously geriatric types, with advanced arthritis, osteoporosis, and injuries sustained 30 or more years before death, who were still kept alive by the rest of the tribe. Humans have been finding some advantages in what would seem at first glance a disadvantagous situation for apparently upwards of 100,000 years.
Unfortunately, Even though all these conditions such as heart disease do greatly impact survival, they aren't common without abundant food. Nature hasn't had many generations to select against them. The gene primarily involved wouldn't be eliminated even if it did pose a threat chiefly to just the raising to maturity part, as that threat was largely masked by other genes that were under more pressure at the time, because they threatened even initial reproduction.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Quite a valid point, but from an evolutionary basis, surviving till you're 25-30 (two quick generations) is far easier than surviving till you're 40-50, which is where obesity and heart disease really get nasty.
what about catyclismic events? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure we have an abundance of food and a sedentary lifestyle now, but our society is quite fragile. If some catyclism were to happen, such as the mile high pacific tsunami predicted if that shelf of hawaii (which is sliding) were to suddenly give way, then we may lose that infrastructure.
If we engineer out or impede this gene, we may end up going extinct in the absence of abundant food supplies, which exist now only because we are artifically, and some argue only temporarily, increasing the carrying capacity of our planet.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
"Heart disease has increased because of a recent increase in saturated and trans-fats in our diet."
"Asthma is mostly caused by pollution"
None of these are true. The cultivation of grains and starchy tubers is what caused it. Morbid obesity, most often seen in the US, is a result of overyly processed foods of the wrong type.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Another possibility is that these proteins may be produced by any of several common mutations of the genome, so that it will spontaneously reoccur in organisms that have managed to l
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Because evolution takes a loooooong time to make changes. You're still born with an appendix, after all, even though it serves no useful function for modern humans.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:5, Interesting)
The knockout mice mentioned above also have major problems, from a brief search of the literature. See this [nih.gov] and this [nih.gov] for example. This implies that the protein has critical functions that are so important that they are somewhat conserved all the way from flies to humans. So important, it seems, that the negative effects of having the protein don't outweigh the positive ones.
Wrong Protein (Score:4, Informative)
"aP2", the topic of the main article, is the "adipocyte lipid-binding protein", also known as "ALBP".
"AP2", or "AP-2", is "Activator protein 2" [google.com] or "Activator protein-2alpha". It seems to be associated, not with fat, but with cancer.
Re:My Question (Score:2)
historical context (Score:2)
Imho that question is premised on flawed assumptions:
1) evolution might have selected against this gene as easily as geneticists
2) evolution had cause to, in historical context
3) therefore the gene must have some other benefit
The article suggests that a2P production is amplified by excessi
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Care to cite a source for this?
Re:My Question (Score:2)
this one is more skeptical, saying it's because of fiber and red meat
http://www.scienzavegetariana.it/nutrizione/vnhl/L Lcancer.html [scienzavegetariana.it]
This one is going to be very biased, but has sources
http://www.vegsource.com/harris/cancer_vegdiet.htm [vegsource.com]
Very Skeptical, "Not all vegetarians avoid cancer and heart disease" actually
http://www.purifymind.com/VegeCancer.htm [purifymind.com]
Another article with yet more sources
http://www.vegetarian-diet.info/cancer-vegetarian- health.htm [vegetarian-diet.info]
And of course, google...
http://www.google.com/search?sourc [google.com]
Re:My Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Another babbles "WE should try to make our mind like land, because land has beautiful virtues, when animal put their excrement on land, it (Land) never express anything angrily, because it (Land) is not swayed or completely indifferent, when human (rich, famous, sage, saint, or perfect people) walk over land, it (Land) feels nothing too, again because it (Land) is not swayed or completely indifferent."
And this is one of the more coherent passage
Re:My Question (Score:2)
"A vegetarian lifestyle of long duration (> or = 20 y) was associated with decreased overall and cancer mortality. Other determinants of decreased cause- specific mortality were physical activity, body weight, and strictness of adherence to the life-style. The relationship between a vegetarian and fiber
Re:My Question (Score:2)
When I saw 90% drop, I was interested, and began to search to see if it was true. One issue I see is that vegetarians tend not to be smokers. Once that is taken out of the equation, you see the differnce is not as great as it seems at first. If there were a signif
Re:My Question (Score:2)
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=red+meat&ie=UT F-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search [google.com]
That is the converse search to vegetarian cancer by the way.
A lot of vegetarians are smokers, very few do it for health. Not only do they smoke weed
I support clean food. (Score:2)
Clean food is food which is healthy for you, if we can have clean vegetarian food, and with our technology it should be possible, we should do this, I'd go vegetarian if I can get a meat equal. Nuts and stuff, seriously, not many people are going to go fully vegetarian, most humans arent designed for it, yes we should eat a lot less meat,
Re:My Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Is RED meat bad for you or..
Is RED meat raised on pesticide polluted corn instead of grass, shot full with hormones and drugs bad for you.
Is CHICKEN bad for you...
Is CHICKEN raised in pens with thousands of others in a highly stressful, low exercise, drug/hormone/pesticide polluted environment bad for you.
I personally think that a lot of the benefits of vegetables, beef, and chicken are not present in factory raised conditions. You have a tomato that *looks* like a tomatoe but which is 80% fiber (so it ships well) and lacks the nutrients. Chicken and beef are good because they eat tons of bugs and plants and concentrate the nutrients and minerals in those plants and we adapted to eating those kinds of animal meats. We have not yet adapted to eating meat that looks like meat but which has different nutritional value than it used to.
Solve the pesticide problem. (Score:2)
So the question here, or the debate we should be having is how to make food cleaner. We all agree on this that food is dirty, and we want clean food and water. You will not have clean food and water if you are focu
Re:Solve the pesticide problem. (Score:2)
Bollocks. I tried it and it felt like, as Owsley says "my body was dying".
Why are eskimos that only eat meat and fat able to survive?
Why so we have slashing canine teeth? They're not for chewing grass.
Why did the incidence of obesity, diabetes and heart disease suddenly skyrocket around the time man changed from a hunter gatherer to an agricultural society and the introduction of grains and dairy into our diets?
I hear this on the CBC 4 years ago and the paleodietician g
Re:Solve the pesticide problem. (Score:2)
Not all humans have the same dietary requirements, and not all humans respond to the same diet the same way.
The different cultures of humans lived different lifestyles for a sufficiently long time that their digestive systems changed to accomodate their food source. This isn't really an evolutionary step because these humans are still 100% compatible with all other humans, but
Re:My Question (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:My Question (Score:2, Funny)
Vegetarians don't live longer it just seems longer
Vegetarians are not healthier (Score:2)
Re:Vegetarians are not healthier (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Ok, hold on, let me search on why meat is healthy, and then remove the propoganda, and then what will you eat?
No, if you want to be healthier, cut down on red meat, more fiber(whole fruit and whole veggies, not juice). Check out the other postnig, check out Google Scholar search. So defensive, and I think much of the health benefit can be translated to a meat eating diet, I'm not trying to convert, I'm just saying you can be
The problem is not the package of the food. (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
There was a studt done quite recently by the American Cancer and American heart associations over a 10 year period with 40,000 poeple. I'm too hot and lazy to google it right now; I
Re:My Question (Score:2)
STB
Humans arent fit for breeding. (Score:3, Insightful)
In nature, the fit are the ones who declare themselves fit. If obese out of shape old men declare themselves more fit than young teenagers in their prime, then they are more fit. Do you see that animals actually have brains and decide among themselves who will be fit a
Re:My Question (Score:2)
It's also grossly incorrect. Obesity and diabetes the result of a system optimized for conservation of rare resources being presented with an overabundance of resources not found in nature (or indeed for most of mankind's time as a civilized species). The majority of human evolution was spent more worrying about starvation than overeating. Man was not meant to have large amount of sugar free fr
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Re:My Question (Score:2)
Stubborn jews.
-b
Re:Six thousand years (Score:3, Interesting)
Do they have a pill yet? (Score:2)
Re:Do they have a pill yet? (Score:2)
Asthma, health worries... (Score:2)
no useful function? (Score:5, Interesting)
Proteins without useful functions tend not to stay around in populations. Chances are that this protein is important for something. Good candidates are fighting off various parasitic infections, or dealing with some kind of physiological stresses. Those conditions may not arise much in Western lifestyles, and hence getting rid of aP2 may be a good idea for us, but the protein almost certainly has some kind of useful function under some conditions.
Re:no useful function? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, it is like the appendix, or some othe holdover. It could be something that once was useful somewhere in other species, and is now not harmful to a individual until later in life, after reproduction years are passed. However, I agree with you, it most likely performs some function that is now likely obselete in our lifestyle, however, I always try to spin more than one hypothesis on any given idea. (The question is, do all species in kindom Mamimalia have this protien?)
Re:no useful function? (Score:2)
That's possible, but seems less likely. Getting rid of the appendix in evolution is difficult, since it probably requires changing the coordinated activity of many genes. Getting rid of a single protein is simple: you get rid of the gene or just alter it slightly.
Furthermore, it's not clear that the human appendix is entirely without function; it may contribute to immune system function, at least early in life. (And, of course, it has a major function, i
Re:no useful function? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, today the appendix is well-understood to be a fully functional organ of the immune system. It tells lymphocytes where to go to fight infections, and it boosts the large intestine's immunity to various foods and drugs. (But it should still be recognized that our current ignorance of the workings
Re:no useful function? (Score:3, Interesting)
If the protein is created by the combination of an ordinarily inert gene and modern environmental conditions (i.e. obesity in the modern calorie abundant and sedentary environment) then the protein would not historically have been "around in populations" and the gene would not have been selected out.
You're making a common mistake, assuming that because nature has evolved us to
aP2 Proteins (Score:2, Funny)
natural way to lower ap2 (Score:4, Interesting)
And, this way is a lot safer that subjecting your body to pre-clinical drugs tried only on mice.
Osho
Re:natural way to lower ap2 (Score:2, Insightful)
WTF? Where are you getting your information? What's with your defeatest attitutde? What, we're just all supposed to accept the fact that we're all going to become obese (except that "lucky 5%"?).
Seriously, obesity in America much, much worse than 20 ye
Re:natural way to lower ap2 (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been doing martial arts for 10 years and seen lots of people lose weight on it. Walking isn't really high intensity enough.
Re:natural way to lower ap2 (Score:2)
No, I'm not talking about losing water weight or temporary weight losses. Unless they quit martial arts, the weight loss is permanent.
Don't draw conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that said, it doesn't mean that more research isn't in order. At some point, they'll want to create a drug that binds to or otherwise inhibits this protein and then probably test it on primates. Who knows, it may turn out to be a wonder cure for asthma and obesity and other things. But it's FAR too soon to draw that conclusion. There's a lot of amazing research going on out there, but this is simply one of many pieces of research that come up witht these kinds of positive results every week. Most don't pan out and until they have a drug for people, it's hardly worth mentioning on Slashdot. If Slashdot mentioned every one of these, that'd be all it did.
Re:Don't draw conclusions (Score:2)
Genes yes, proteins, not necessarily. Genes encode proteins, so an identical gene in a human as found in a mouse will encode the same protein. What a protein does in a mouse and what it does in a person or a fish may be quite different. Not so much in its specific action so much as in the cascade of events that lead to its use or more importantly, the cascade of events that follow. This is precisely why humans frequently don't respond the
aP2, not a2p (Score:4, Funny)
people should eventually die (Score:2)
Well, duh... (Score:2)
Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah - deleting it prevents them from becoming diabetic and from developing asthma - because without it endoytosis doesn't work right, the immune response is hampered and and so some autoimmune diseases don't happen.
Deleting it also screws with absorption of lipids, hence no fatty liver disease, atherosclerosis or obesity.
In addition, it's involved in recycling of presynapric vesicle membranes so it wouldn't surprise me if deleting / blocking it had cognitive / behavioral effects.
So, yeah, it sounds like getting rid of it is a miracle cure, but (as others have pointed out), it's there for a reason.
Come on, does anyone really believe that knocking out a single protein would make a 'metabolic super-mouse'?
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2)
Speak for yourself, mister. I was getting the shakes.
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2)
To quote the immortal Beverly Cleary: "First time's funny, second time's silly, third time's spanking."
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2)
Time for the vaccine. (Score:2, Troll)
If this really is just a single protien, well then, it's going to be sold. How do we find it? How much will it cost? If it's going to be a prescribed drug, how can we buy stock? If it's a vaccine, how can we get one?
I don't know, I suppose right now none of this matters because the earth wont last long enough to even make this drug and test it. Chances are, we will die of the flu before
Re:Time for the vaccine. (Score:2)
If you really believe our technological age is going to come to an end, why don't you build a big-ass monument that endures time and hide all the information of the world inside it, and hide it so only if a culture is advanced enough to find it can utilize it? With the reason that if it isn't advanced enough to understand the importance of that information, it might destroy it and discard it as worthless.
If you really believe things are coming to an end, why aren't you praying to your god, or activ
Re:Time for the vaccine. (Score:2)
Re:Someone's got to say it (Score:2)
Original quote included side-effects (Score:5, Funny)
See the original quote in full:
All the mice died instantly, but on the positive side we cannot make them obese, diabetic or atherosclerotic. They don't develop fatty liver disease, and they don't develop asthma.
Apparently dead mice don't have much appetite. The scientists are continuing their investigations.
Re:subject this (Score:2)
Please forgive the extreme cynicism here, but this sort of nonsense is a plague on the scientific community as a whole. On a person-to-person basis our society pr