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from the progress-against-a-nasty-disease dept.
https://news.ubc.ca/2017/10/31/alzheimers-disease-might-be-a-whole-body-problem/
Alzheimer's disease, the leading cause of dementia, has long been assumed to originate in the brain but new research indicates that it could be triggered by breakdowns elsewhere in the body.
The findings, published today in Molecular Psychiatry [DOI: 10.1038/mp.2017.204] [DX], offer hope that future drug therapies might be able to stop or slow the disease without acting directly on the brain, which is a complex, sensitive and often hard-to-reach target. Instead, such drugs could target the kidney or liver, ridding the blood of a toxic protein [amyloid-β protein] before it ever reaches the brain.
"Alzheimer's disease is clearly a disease of the brain, but our research shows that we need to pay attention to the whole body to understand where it comes from, and how to stop it," said Dr. Weihong Song, UBC psychiatry professor.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:06PM
An OS watchdog timer only works if the kernel itself hasn't become corrupted; I don't think it's possible for system to analyze itself effectively without a rogue component that has been designed to be as independent as possible from the rest of the system.
I mean, there's a reason it's difficult for a lot of people to keep themselves from drinking too much alcohol; it's hard to be reasonable about something that explicitly diminishes reason.
Instead of figuring out how to self-check, spend your time figuring out how to kill yourself in a non-violent, peaceful way, which includes figuring out how to prepare yourself to follow through with such a decision. Alzheimer's or not, the longer you live, the more likely you'll need to make that choice (or, like most people, choose not to think about it, and then just futilely claw in fear as the Universe sucks you down its merciless hole of eternal oblivion). Hypoxia by nitrogen gas seems like a good choice.
None of us knows how the story will go. The only thing we do know is that it won't end well. Prepare accordingly.