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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

> “Furthermore, we are dedicated to exploring potential therapeutic strategies aimed at restoring normal mitochondrial function to rectify the mitochondrial dysfunctions implicated in the disease.”

I can't help but feel excited. Breakthroughs in Parkinson's, breakthroughs in ME/CFS, breakthroughs in long covid. And the cool part? They all seem to follow similar hypotheses of mitochondrial dysfunction.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abq1533

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/09/17/fatigue-cfs...

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It's an exciting time and I think we are in a lag where all the tremendous progress in microbiology and related tech is starting to kick into high gear in delivering results. Basic things like being able to sequence whole human genomes for $500 and super cheap ability to introduce perturbations and observe their effects (CRISPR) have propelled research tremendously over the last few years, but many studies involving humans just take years to complete regardless of tech, so we are just starting to really see the results of these come through. I expect the next decade is going to see unprecedented progress in understanding of all kinds of severe diseases, as well as (with some further lag) development of therapies.

First clinical trial of CRISPR base editing started in Sept this year after only being known in 2016. Exciting!

Watching from a distance, I think a lot of our fast progress recently is because of better tooling. Better ways to see what is happening at a microlevel, and manipulate it too.

Like someone could run endless experiments on how to "balance the four humors" perfectly and get nowhere with all these diseases, perhaps not even be able to clearly define and distinguish them from one another.

Absolutely. It is an exciting time for science. And also for someone who may have one of these unexplainable diseases.

Can we possibly expect something similar for other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's?

We have investigations into mitochondrial genetics and Alzheimer's. There's still a lot to learn but it's probably safe to assume there's a lot more going on. Treatment and even prevention for most will likely rely on attending to more than just mitochondrial abberations.

Physionic: Fasting and Overeating - How you Change your Mitochondria. [Study 32] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBmtzT4VTU Goes into great detail in how abundance of energy causes Mitochondrial to split into smaller pieces and go into high churn (low ATP output) but when in a low energy environment the Mitochondria join into longer chains and actually change how they work. There is other talks in how long chain Mitochondria outputs being used in brain cell inter communication and having said Mitochondria being too small massively inhibits those systems.

Mitochondria are at the center of a lot of key processes in general. They play an important role in regulating cell death and free radicals in the body. They also play a role that is still being studied in what membrane receptors are transported to the surface in neurons.

There's a lot that intersects at the mitochondria making it common across many pathogenesis and a very delicate system to interfere with (not ideal for intervention)

Crazy how important mitochondria are when you consider the evolutionary history.

Just so, so, so unlikely to happen to my small mind and stunning how far multicellular life has come with this symbiosis.

yeah how do you solve this problem though?

once enough mtdna has been depleted it's irreversible

Unfortunately maybe the solution is not a cure but a vaccine that prevents depletion.

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