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4 hours ago by steelframe

As somebody who has a somewhat strange form of Multiple Sclerosis wherein almost all of the damage is in my so-called "water channel" nerves located in my optic nerves and around my brain stem, the observation that pathogens get "swept" into the area of my CNS where most of my lesions occur is very interesting. I've been tested multiple times for neuromyelitis optica, but that's come back negative each time, so it's still officially diagnosed as MS. It's just that my white matter has been completely untouched for the 23 years I've had symptoms, which is really unusual.

Interferon beta worked really well for me, and now Ocrelizumab is doing even better.

I'm convinced that what we call "Multiple Sclerosis" today is actually a collection of distinct conditions with largely orthogonal causes, and just about the best we can do in absence of a more thorough understanding of the issues is nuke all the adolescent B-lymphocytes (which is what Ocrelizumab does).

an hour ago by rusty-rust

When last did you perform the tests for NMO? In the last decade quite a few new tests have been developed.

There are two antibody tests you can perform to determine if you have NMOSD; Anti-Mog and Aquaporin-4

17 minutes ago by treeman79

Ever been tested for Sjogrens? An autoimmune disorder that attacks fluid producing systems.

3 hours ago by therein

Here is an interesting fact for anyone who might be reading.

All the medications with the -mab suffix are monoclonal antibodies.

For instance the "monoclonal antibody cocktail" Trump received was casirivimab and imdevimab, made by Regeneron.

3 hours ago by steelframe

Another fun fact: BioNTech, the company that co-developed the mRNA COVID vaccine, applied similar techniques to develop an experimental MS vaccine.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/960371/vaccine-maker-biontech...

Of course if I could have a Bitcoin for every time "autoimmune encephalomyelitis" has been cured in a mouse model I would be set for life!

3 hours ago by faeyanpiraat

Do you happen to know an online MS community with folks similar to the HN crowd?

16 minutes ago by treeman79

Reddit and Facebook tend to have good communities.

7 minutes ago by alanchen

Don't run unsafe code with root. That's common sense lol

an hour ago by wombatmobile

> The new findings help clarify one detail of Shiraiā€™s 1921 mouse study that never sat well with the naive notion of immune privilege. Shirai found that tumors survived and grew when implanted in some locations in miceā€™s brains. But when Shirai placed tumors right next to the ventricles ā€” now known to be the locations where the brain produces the fluid that sweeps antigens off to the immune cells ā€” the tumors didnā€™t survive.

So, the key experiment to reveal this fact was performed one hundred years ago, but overlooked.

6 hours ago by Diggsey

I like that it is a literal "back door" in that there's an opening in the barrier at the back of the brain.

7 hours ago by doggodaddo78

Brain region to immune system: I am root.

Immune system: Yes you are, my bad.

or I'm going to call bullshit on that. Put your arms up and prepare for phagocytosis.

3 hours ago by judge2020

Now if only the immune system was open source and not some binary blob we can only interfaced with by giving it fake targets.

2 hours ago by bronzeage

It is open source. You can go ahead and download the human genome. You just can't run it because of a lack of efficient simulation, and unlike human-created code the code is both obfuscated and lacks clear separation of intents.

37 minutes ago by smegger001

yeah its a code base millions of years old consisting of spaghetti code with no comments written in a turring tarpit of a language that compiles directly to hardware with ridiculous compile times

an hour ago by tux3

The GPL makes this "binary" vs "source" distinction by talking about the "preferred form for making changes". Well, the binary blob of DNA happens to be also be the source!

Feel free to publish your genome under an open source license =)

4 hours ago by Wassimo

Hopefully this will lead to better treatment of brain tumors and other diseases.

5 hours ago by grouphugs

headline: more harmful nazi technology

what a surprise, anyone notice a very strong and deliberate pattern here?

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