A 'Cure for Heart Disease'? A Single Shot Succeeds in Monkeys (nytimes.com) 94
"What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime?" asks the New York Times.
"In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease." (Alternate source here.) Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. "This could be the cure for heart disease," said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come. The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published...
Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes' function do not get heart disease.
"In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease." (Alternate source here.) Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. "This could be the cure for heart disease," said Dr. Michael Davidson, director of the Lipid Clinic at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
But it will be years before human trials can begin, and gene-editing technology so far has a mixed tracked record. It is much too early to know whether the strategy will be safe and effective in humans; even the monkeys must be monitored for side effects or other treatment failures for some time to come. The results were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, this year held virtually with about 3,700 attendees around the world. The scientists are writing up their findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed or published...
Both genes are active in the liver, which is where cholesterol and triglycerides are produced. People who inherit mutations that destroyed the genes' function do not get heart disease.
Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers. I mean look at how widespread many crappy gene mutations are without even giving much, if any, advantage.
Not saying it's false, just saying I'm skeptical off the bat that disabling these genes without some compensation measures is overall advantageous.
Re: Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Skeptical (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers. I mean look at how widespread many crappy gene mutations are without even giving much, if any, advantage.
Not saying it's false, just saying I'm skeptical off the bat that disabling these genes without some compensation measures is overall advantageous.
No, that is not true. It would be true if people died from heart related problems before they have offspring.
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If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers. I mean look at how widespread many crappy gene mutations are without even giving much, if any, advantage.
Not saying it's false, just saying I'm skeptical off the bat that disabling these genes without some compensation measures is overall advantageous.
No, that is not true. It would be true if people died from heart related problems before they have offspring.
That's too simple. There are also benefits to your genes in helping bringing the children up, as long as that makes them statistically more successful in reproducing themselves.
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But if poor people have more children (as seems to be the case), being around to to raise your child (thus decreasing their probability of poverty) is actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
Be careful, you are making the too-common mistake of assuming correlation is causation. ...
Yes poor people have more children on average (in the developed world at least), but this certainly does not mean poverty increases fertility.
The reverse is more obvious: having children makes you poorer.
But there are a few things that can cause both reduced income, and increase fecundity, both personal and environmental. e.g. lower IQ, unemployment, some religions, rural living, lower education,
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That's certainly not obvious. If you're a farmer, having children you can put to work makes you richer. The developing world has more children primarily because children are more useful there.
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If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers. I mean look at how widespread many crappy gene mutations are without even giving much, if any, advantage.
Not saying it's false, just saying I'm skeptical off the bat that disabling these genes without some compensation measures is overall advantageous.
No, that is not true. It would be true if people died from heart related problems before they have offspring.
That's too simple. There are also benefits to your genes in helping bringing the children up, as long as that makes them statistically more successful in reproducing themselves.
That may be true, but heart disease rarely kills a person before they have the opportunity to raise kids. Consider the paleolithic era and the time preceding that where human evolution was driven by more environmental pressures (remember, man hasn't been civilized for very long and civilization greatly reduces the effects of natural selection). During those early years, many humans hunted by chasing animals to exhaustion because stamina was the major advantage people had. Basically, they received great card
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Your post makes sense if you are talking about a significantly large population. But given this is the result of a mutation, that should mean that at some point the population with that mutation was exceedingly small (1 individual maybe, or a few if it happened more than once). So somehow this 1 person's genes had to outcompete a lot of others to become as prevalent as it is in society.
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Same as with prescribing lipids, they don't consider a loss of 3 IQ points to be a negative side affect unless you lost your job because of it. So it never gets counted as being bad, even when they measure it.
And obviously it increases dementia. The brain is mostly cholesterol.
As far as evolution and the triglycerides, we don't actually need nearly as much of that sort of response as we used to, since we have doctors, cooked food, handwashing, sewers, etc.
I can totally see some small changes have a big bene
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The brain is mostly cholesterol.
You mean fat, not cholesterol. While the brain is about 60% fat, it only contains about 35 grams of cholesterol [hindawi.com] - or about 2.3% of the average adult brain.
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Try finding a link that gives an HTML response.
You're on the web, not on social media. When you spam something like that, it doesn't even render in people's web browsers. Why? Because they're nerds and their browsers don't do XSS.
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Social media? Spam? LOL, whatever man.
I'm using Chrome, and it doesn't have a problem with the link. Just tried Edge and Firefox, again no problem. Sound like the problem is on your end. If you're a "nerd" and have your browser configured so that you can't access a paper on a site for "Open Access publishing for the scientific community", well maybe you could find your own source that meets your browser requirements. You almost certainly could've found one in the time it took you to write that post.
Cost may be very Cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
The trade-offs to survive such a world are very different to the modern world. Perhaps these genes help you extract more energy from food or allow you to store excess energy more efficiently? That would be great for survival in the Stone Age but today food is plentiful, too plentiful in fact, and being less efficient in processing it to avoid heart disease would be a trade anyone would happily make.
We should all remain sceptical until there is evidence to show that it works but I disagree that there are grounds to be so pessimistic. There is much we do not understand the purpose of genes. In fact it was only a few years ago that they discovered that the reason that the genes for colour blindness/defficiency were still around was probably because it made certain types of animal camouflage much less effective than it was for normal colour vision.
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There may be a cost but that cost might be a price we are more than willing to pay in today's environment.
I dunno. I suspect that if this works they'll charge $100,000 per injection or something like that.
Rich people only.
Re: Cost may be very Cheap (Score:2)
Not really, gene editing is cheap and simple enough to DIY. Just google biohacker crispr. It canâ(TM)t really be stopped once the edits are known. The cost will drop rapidly, faster than computing.
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Rich people only? How much does rice and beans cost? Turns out that the only diet proven to reverse heart disease is a low-fat plant-based diet; Dr. Dean Ornish proved that in the early 90s. Rice, corn, beans, legumes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, fruits and vegetables. It's inexpensive stuff compared to a heart bypass or stents and statins.
Re:Skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers.
You are correct... for hunter-gatherer humans. However, society has radically altered the human diet and not even all humans are compatible with that new diet (see: food allergies). Our intake of sugar, meat, grains and really just food in general is absurdly higher than it used to be so it's no wonder people are dying as a result of their diets.
However, the key element is that people are dying after they have raised their offspring. Beyond that point, evolution is no longer a factor.
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You make a valid point, but I don't believe we suffer from these heart diseases for a long time for evolution to have an effect yet. The heart diseases are often a result of eating habits and I don't believe that people had diets as rich as we have today just a few hundred years ago.
One can then still argue against the treatment, because if we did eat healthier in the past and we there manage to develop these genes, that what is or was their original purpose? And what happens when people with no heart disea
Nope, there is no advantage (Score:2)
Evolutionary advantages propagate if they impact the ability to foster children. That's the reason, typical old age problems (eg teeth etc.,) don't show the same evolution where caries resistant teeth naturally evolve. Heart disease impacts older people, and since having heard disease in old age does not impact you having children in your young age, it does not get "evolved" out.
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That's the reason, typical old age problems (eg teeth etc.,) don't show the same evolution where caries resistant teeth naturally evolve.
I agree with your post and want to add an interesting example here: If a Koala lives to old age (about 6 years) it will wear down its teeth from chewing so much eucalyptus and then it will starve to death. Enough Koalas have the time to reproduce before this time that the species persists.
Koalas have not evolved some ability to avert this inevitable demise nor have they gone extinct. All lifeforms strike a similar balance. Heart disease is just our teeth wearing down after we have served our reproductive pu
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Why don't I have mod points now? I only ever get them when I don't need them. This needs to be upvoted as insightful!
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No. The reason for the existence of a gene which permits the production of cholesterol and for its usage in cellular repair (specifically vascular repair) is because in the "olden days" the ancestors of every single human alive today is alive only because their ancestors possessed this particular genetic mutation at a time when "sunlight" was scarce and Vitamin D deficiency caused those that did not possess the mutation to die before breeding age.
Since only those in possession of the necessary genetic trai
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Not quite true - grandmothers can carry some of the load of caring for the kids, and that also raises the chances of the kids' survival. Then you need the grandfathers to help support the grandmothers.
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If destructive mutations in just two genes is required to eliminate heart disease at zero cost, the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers. I mean look at how widespread many crappy gene mutations are without even giving much, if any, advantage.
Not saying it's false, just saying I'm skeptical off the bat that disabling these genes without some compensation measures is overall advantageous.
The claim of being a cure or eliminating heart diseases appears to be a huge exaggeration, at least in the sense that most lay people would understand. At least one study [onlinejacc.org] shows a 34% reduced risk of coronary artery disease and a 35% reduced risk of myocardial infarction. To me, although any risk reduction is a good thing, a 35% reduction is not anywhere close to "elimination." That is, the genes are significant, but there are other significant factors involved.
The mutation appears to almost always result
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Except that "evolutionary advantage" is something that mankind defeated some time ago, something that you fail to understand.
Back when mankind was subject to "evolutionary advantage", life expectancy was much shorter and heart disease was not top of the list.
But go ahead and be skeptical, it's not as though you demonstrate great insight on this or anything else.
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Potentially, but most people didn't have a diet that necessarily contributed to widespread heart disease until the last century or two. Plus typically heart disease doesn't typically affect people until after their prime reproductive years anyways; it could be that prior to recent advances in medical technology extended lifespans, people just weren't going to live long enough for heart disease to be what takes them out.
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The problem is evolution takes time. Heart disease only really became
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the gene would be much more common and widespread due to the evolutionary advantage it offers
If heart disease was a problem in young, reproductive age humans, then you would be correct. However, by the time most humans would have heart disease issues, they are long past child rearing age, and evolution doesn't really come into play.
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Yes. So?
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Sorry for whoever thought to mod you down. I thought your comment was funny. You deserve a banana!
Evolution (Score:3)
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
It should be noted that evolution really doesn't give a rat's ass about what happens to you past your reproductive years. A gene that is harmful only in old age is pretty much irrelevant, evolutionarilly speaking....
Re:Evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
You are ignoring the very obvious benefits of having parents and grandparents around to protect and help you. You are much more likely to thrive if they don't kick off too quickly. That sure looks like it would have some evolutionary pressure going for it.
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Yes, there's a lot of recent work suggesting that this is exactly an evolutionary path taken by humans, using care by grandparents to improve the odds of survival of children.
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You are ignoring the very obvious benefits of having parents and grandparents around to protect and help you.
Heart disease kills people when the kids are generally old enough to look after themselves. It is also worth pointing out that it has only become a problem in the past 50+ years when we have had far more leisure time, far less exercise and far more food. These are not the same environmental conditions that selected our genes for survival. Technology as changed our lives on a timescale much shorter than the one evolution functions on.
Re:Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Otzi the Iceman had heart disease.
"Past research has revealed that Ötzi likely suffered from joint pain, Lyme disease and tooth decay, and computed tomography (CT) scanning revealed calcium buildups, a sign of atherosclerosis, in his arteries."
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False, that is NOT what "life expectancy" means.
Life expectancy IS NOT the same as average life em>span. Life span is how long an adult individual is expected to live. Life expectancy is something completely different, and wraps in child mortality. You never use life expectancy when talking about individuals and their expected outcomes. It isn't for that. You use it when you're modelling population levels.
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You never use life expectancy when talking about individuals and their expected outcomes.
I am not talking about his "expected outcome" because we already know his specific outcome: he was murdered at age 45. What I am doing is comparing his age at death to the rest of his society and life expectancy is exactly the correct statistic to use.
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No, that does not tell you anything! That tells you how many babies die. He wasn't a baby.
An adult you have to use life span and his expected life span would be the same as person today without access to health care.
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"I found a correlation, it must be causal, right?"
Durrrrr.
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"I mistake a causative factor for a correlative one."
Durrrr.
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While that's true, it's to the species benefit to have old people die off.
Re: Evolution (Score:2)
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It isn't so much "bizarre" as 1950s. LOL
They can't (functionally) read, they'll never have any chance to discover all the research from the 1980s and `90s that showed even extended lifespan of aunts and uncles increases lifespan among apes.
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what nonsense comic book did your biology class use? We have LOADS of useless genes, 75% or more our DNA is junk.
Re:Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
what nonsense comic book did your biology class use?
This is the natural result of morons thinking that evolution is "survival of the fittest" without understanding that that is only during selection events where most individuals died, like when a comet crashes into the planet and causes an extinction event. Almost all K-12 is taught this way exclusively, and even in college classes you'll get random doses of it.
Absent a selection event, evolution is driven by sexual choice, and is not tightly bound to those sorts of engineering-type considerations of performance and efficiency. And then there is the fact that a gene you don't need now might be needed later, so it might be important to have some percent of the population with that gene; and it may be that species who narrow themselves too much, by trimming out unused genes, are less likely to survive selection events. (Spoiler: it is)
That's one advantage of doing gene editing on post-reproduction adults; you still get to keep the gene in the population even if you don't know what is used for in a crisis.
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evolution is driven by sexual choice
Underappreciated fact. So, be sure you're there X years from now.
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Cite: Thomas 7 and 84.
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You're going full retard with your confirmation bias declaration of "junk DNA".
At best, we don't know if it has a current function [wikipedia.org], let alone if it had a function historically, history being a precondition of today.
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No, you are the retard. There is a minority opinion not born out by any science mentioned there. The junk DNA can't express protein, it has no function. Most our DNA is junk without purpose, that is the mainstream view with no evidence to contrary.
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The part that is considered junk are non-coding regions. That is, parts of DNA code that don't encode for any proteins, therefore they are by definition NOT genes. If we have "useless genes", that is not related to junk DNA .. junk DNA does not refer to genes it refers to parts of our DNA that is not genes.
DNA garbage collector is still work in progress (Score:2)
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OK, wannabe pedant, now look up pseudogene and find out that there is no clear line, in the case of the human genome, between a "useless (read: inactive) gene" and something that used to be a gene. Or is almost a gene. There is no barrier or gap between the ideas that the words represent; and much of the context here falls inside this grey area.
You're completely wrong, and when studies are working in this area, they have to constantly use phrases like, "variation in gene and pseudogene."
There is no bright
Science (Score:2)
Science told me heart disease was caused by impolitic food.
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Science told me heart disease was caused by impolitic food.
Merely from your syntax, without any direct knowledge of what you were actually told, it is clear that you were told that medical science is politics, and greasy food is macho.
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Cool story. You should add a talking dog and a tragic zeppelin accident.
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C. Everett Koop had his faults, but he had good "advice" on heart disease - "the most important thing you can do to prevent heart disease is pick your parents wisely".
If you've inherited good genes (in this specific regard), you can worry less about what you eat. But if you do have a predisposition to heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc. then the foods you eat can have a big impact.
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And then they said to eat lots of carbs and limit intake of protein and fat — the exact opposite of what turned out to be the best answer.
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Nobody mainstream ever said that. You ignored the doctors, listened to the teevee talking head, and then, knowing yourself to be Virtuous, you remembered it as if you had listened to a doctor.
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This is sortof true; high (total) cholesterol and high blood pressure run in my family. But not heart disease. People who eat poorly in my family don't die of heart disease or stroke, they die of bowel cancer and type 2 diabetes complications. The people who eat well still live over a decade longer, and enjoy better quality of life in those late years.
The lack of heart disease doesn't seem to impact diet-related health considerations that much if you keep digging. It just looks that way briefly from the pea
Cholesterol (Score:2)
I thought every properly done study so far showd no correlation between heart disease and cholesterol...
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I thought every properly done study so far showd no correlation between heart disease and cholesterol...
I'd be interested a citation to one or more of these properly done studies.
That's not a sarcastic comment, by the way-- I really would like to see those results.
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I will admit readily that I don't have a single citation handy...
I should relly start building a little black notebook for citations, I know, but all I can say is there was a big scandal in 2005 about improper scientific method and a LOT of studies were checked as far back as the fifties, including most if not all cholesterol studies... and all found to be weak.
notebook [Re:Cholesterol] (Score:2)
I will admit readily that I don't have a single citation handy...
ah, too bad. Would be interesting to see some real analysis.
I should relly start building a little black notebook for citations, I know, but all I can say is there was a big scandal in 2005 about improper scientific method and a LOT of studies were checked as far back as the fifties, including most if not all cholesterol studies... and all found to be weak.
You know, I should start doing that. So many times I read a study, take mental note of an interesting result, then a year or two later somebody brings up the subject and I know that there was a study but have long ago lost the citation.
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It seems like it was reported in the free portion of New Scientist, but I'm not 100% sure that was the place...
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No, they show no link between dietary cholesterol and heart disease.
Build up of cholesterol in the arteries is still an issue.
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That buildup, as far as I am informed, is the body's bandaid to arterial weakening so basically a symptom of the problem and not the cause.
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Properly done studies show no significant correlation between heart disease and dietary cholesterol, and only a small correlation between total cholesterol and heart disease.
But if you're doing the other things that cause heart disease, like eating a high carb diet, then lowering your total cholesterol seems to lower risk of death by heart attack. Presumptively it would also increase dementia, since the brain is mostly cholesterol, but doctors resolutely reject that sort of presumtive caution in favor of "n
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As far as I know, the primary cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease, which is closely related to the buildup of clumps of misfolded proteins, not a lack of cholesterol. The second leading cause is strokes, which are made more likely by high cholesterol levels.
Cholesterol comes from 2 sources, the food we eat and internal synthesis. I'd guess that too low cholesterol would be difficult to achieve.
Cholesterol is the symptom, not the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Ingested cholesterol does not result in higher serum levels. Higher serum levels are a symptom of heart disease, not the cause. Heart disease is caused by excess sugar, grains and other inflammatories which cause the areries to inflame, causing them to leak. Your body in turn attempts to plug the leaks by increasing serum cholesterol and it adheres to the artery walls, stopping the leakage. The proof is in the pudding, when you stop consuming sugars and grains, the body stops producing excess cholesterol, and the arteries clear up. Artificially blocking the uptake of cholesterol has never been shown to reduce heart disease. Cholesterol is essential to the functioning of the nerves and brain, which is composed mostly of cholesterol.
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There is evidence that a number of substances can reduce atherosclerotic damage: Vitamin K, pomegranate, carnosine, magnesium, tocotrienols and dark grapes.
"Supplementation with folic acid, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12 has been shown not only to normalize homocysteine levels, but also to reverse the damage done by elevated homocysteine and even to further reduce carotid atherosclerotic plaques in those with normal levels of homocysteine." (Life Extension magazine, June 2004)
Note that supplements are not a gu
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Your knowledge is out of date.
CVD can be reversed. One of the big vitamins that does this is Vitamin K2 (which most of us don't get enough of in our diets)
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Low-carbohydrate diets can also reverse CVD.
Plaque build up in the arteries doesn't happen from the inner walls and move outside. It happens on the exterior and moves in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Bad News... (Score:1)
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OK, Dumb Ass, you didn't know that the messenger is not the source? Really?
You're so stupid that when you read a story in the newspaper, you think the journalist is the source?
Is that confusion caused by all your "trusted" sources being sources of opinion?
We shot the monkey once (Score:3)
and now it doesn't have to worry about it's dicky heart.
No heart disease, eh? (Score:2)
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Creationist here.... (Score:2)
The real questions are what will be the intended side effects if any... what else do those genes affect that we don't understand.
It's frankly embarrassing how you let irrelevant things distract you from the issues at hand. That type of science is the kind that rests on the shifting sands of human understanding, rather than solid facts. What you determine to be a fact to day will be nonsense tomorrow as long as it fits the model of today.... that sort of "s
How nice! We can keep eating junk! (Score:2)
And never learn a fucking think!
Just remember to keep paying your dealer, like a good junkie!
What if eating differently was even more effective (Score:1)