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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I hate this because I want to believe technology and AI and will result in modern medicine where everyone has long healthy lives.

Medical technology and AI is not even close to any major improvement in life expectancy, except in much rare cases (heart transplants is one example: they're insignificant in raising overall life expectancy, as they're statistically too rare to matter).

The big majority of the improvement in life expectancy in the 20th century was from low-hanging stuff like running water, sterilization, waste disposal, and basic antibiotics, not from the high-tech transplants, DNA research, fancy drugs and so on.

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That's just not true.

Fancy drugs save lives. Big time. My Mom had cancer and was treated with Rituximab. She's doing just fine 10 years later. That type of cancer would have been a death sentence 30 years before. There are lots of other anti-cancer drugs like Rituximab, and they save lives every day.

Despite these advances, life expectancy in the US is declining. If you google for something like ‘life expectancy change if cancer cured’ you’ll find that estimates of the effect on life expectancy of curing heart disease and cancer don’t exceed more than several years each. And looking into the far future, even if all disease is cured, and aging eliminated, life expectancy only increases to around 1000.

1,000 is a number definitely pulled out thin air.

Make AI. Choose next path :

(1) herculean effort to make it confirm to what they have established as politically correct.

(2) improve AI.

Everyone wants "politically correct" AI.

Wanna keep it from turning murderbot or paperclip maximizer? Welcome to the arena of politics of correct values. Wanna use it for longevity research? Same.

Some people also would like to make sure it isn't helping stoke antisemitism or genocide, but apparently that's controversial for some reason, so guess it's political.

(And that's before we get to the usual issue that people using "politically correct" as the drive-by aspersion that's so unfortunately common are usually more ideological than those they criticize and very much have their own political correctness they're anxious to impose by any means available to them...)

(1) herculean effort to make it treat everyone with kindness and respect.

(2) improve AI.

(3) work out how to do both at the same time.

FTFY

Having been vaccinated for Tdap recently very reliably predicts a 40% lower risk of dementia.

I gather flu vaccine has similar effect size. Nobody knows why. Ask, and people speculate about inflammation.

Having been treated for herpes lately -- valacyclovir, lately -- seems too to have outsize effect. I get all three.

People doing autopsies say brains they examine are very often laced with herpes virus and bacteria, vs. doctrine that insists nothing gets in.

US grants $2B annually to study plaque formation in transgenic mice. Approximately none of it goes for anything of value. When the amyloid boat sinks, a lot of biochemists will need to find something else to do. They would better look early.

I'm young (early 30s) but have a strong family history of late onset Alzheimers (my father, and both of my mother's parents). I also get cold sores on occasion. I've brought this -- and the HSV-Alzheimers connection -- up to my doctor and a nurse, but neither had heard of the connection before (but I directed them to [0]), or thought it was worth pursuing anything like valacyclovir.

Roughly, the sentiment was that I am young and have time to wait for more research, that taking drugs long term will itself likely have consequences. I'm not inclined to disagree there, although the evidence seems quite strong.

I look forward to seeing more funding and scientific effort directed toward other avenues.

[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234998/

Td too or just Tdap?

The paper said Tdap. I don't know if people in US get Td. I would get all the vaccinations locally available.

People get Td after car accidents in the ER as a precaution if skin is broken

Don't forget deprecating tobacco and alcohol consumption.

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