“An Ancient Cure for Alzheimer’s?”
“Dr. Trumble was trained as an anthropologist, and his field — evolutionary medicine — taught him to see our surroundings as a blip in the timeline of human history. He thinks it’s a problem that medical research focuses almost exclusively on “people who live in cities like New York or L.A.” Scientists often refer to these places as “Weird” — Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic — and point out that our bodies are still designed for the not-Weird environment in which our species evolved. Yet we know almost nothing about how dementia affected humans during the 50,000 years before developments like antibiotics and mechanized farming…
Dr. Trumble was particularly interested in the ApoE4 gene, often called the Alzheimer’s gene. Americans who carry two copies of the gene are more than 10 times as likely to develop the late-onset form of the disease. Dr. Trumble found something startling when he looked into the Tsimane data: Many of those with a copy of the gene seemed to perform better on the cognitive tests…
“Humans co-evolved with a number of different parasites, but today, in our sedentary city life, we’ve removed those parasites from the mix,” Dr. Trumble said. This could be what transformed the gene from an advantage into a liability…
Dr. Trumble has hopes that his work will eventually lead to treatments as well. These days cancer scientists are brewing up designer viruses that help the body attack tumors. Why not designer parasites?”
This is why I love biology, it’s never simple and it teaches so many lessons about balance. Designer parasites? Amazing
