Dr Noc

BKjr is going to cost people their lives.

Oy

There can be no greater oxymoron than when somebody from the Trump gang calls together a "panel of experts".

"Don't let anybody tell you there's nothing wrong with vaccines, but let's go ahead and remove all mention of known problems that can be caused by pumping your ass full of hormones."

To be clear, my understanding is that hormone replacement isn't known to cause cancer, but an abundance of (eg) estrogen can feed it, causing an existing cancer to grow faster.

That's a simple non-clinician's take on it - kinda like BKjr not having one fucking bit of clinical background, and then providing guidance according to his crew of fellow Dunning-Kruger subjects.

If you have a medical problem, you don't call me, or a plumber, or a junky roids ranger - you call a real live, honest-to-god, licensed practitioner. You call a fucking doctor.

Today's Nerdy Thing

I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Trump and BKjr and all those assholes plutocrats don't fuck this up too.

Dr Knurick

I don't know what it is about certain people - like this mush-brained BKjr.

I think I get the part of it where anti-vaxxers say they're just pushing back on commercialized medicine.

But I don't think that's what's happening - at least that's not what they end up focused on. When your "movement" gets turned into a death cult, sponsored by the power of the federal government, then you're giving all of us a problem that should be exclusive to you.

If you don't want to get vaccinated, then OK, that part's up to you. But that makes you a potential threat to the herd - my herd - and I don't need anything extra to worry about. So do what you think you should do, but do that somewhere else - away from the rest of us.

Calling Dr Kennedy

Quick - somebody get hold of BKjr and tell him those evil science nerds are trying to inject heavy metals directly into our brains!

Research on reversing Alzheimer’s reveals lithium as potential key

Years of investigation by scientists at Harvard has revealed that lithium is deeply involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to new treatments.

Seven years of investigation by scientists at Harvard Medical School has revealed that the loss of the metal lithium plays a powerful role in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to earlier detection, new treatments and a broader understanding of how the brain ages.

Researchers led by Bruce A. Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, reported that they were able to reverse the disease in mice and restore brain function with small amounts of the compound lithium orotate, enough to mimic the metal’s natural level in the brain. Their study appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The obvious impact is that because lithium orotate is dirt cheap, hopefully we will get rigorous, randomized trials testing this very, very quickly,” said Matt Kaeberlein, former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, who did not participate in the study. “And I would say that it will be an embarrassment to the Alzheimer’s clinical community if that doesn’t happen right away.”

Cue the private equity assholes to buy up all the lithium rights - can't have affordable healthcare now can we.

Yankner, who is also the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, said: “I do not recommend that people take lithium at this point, because it has not been validated as a treatment in humans. We always have to be cautious because things can change as you go from mice to humans.” He added that the findings still need to be validated by other labs.

Although there have been recent breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, no medication has succeeded in stopping or reversing the disease that afflicts more than 7 million Americans, a number projected to reach almost 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Pathology images from the brain of an Alzheimer's mouse model. The images show that when the mice are treated with a very low dose of lithium orotate, it almost completely eradicates the amyloid plaques and the tau tangle-like structures. (Harvard)

Lithium is widely prescribed for patients with bipolar disorder, and previous research indicated that it held potential as an Alzheimer’s treatment and an antiaging medication. A 2017 study in Denmark suggested the presence of lithium in drinking water might be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.

However, the new work is the first to describe the specific roles that lithium plays in the brain, its influence on all of the brain’s major cell types and the effect that its deficiency later in life has on aging.

Results of the study by Yankner’s lab and researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago also suggest that measuring lithium levels might help doctors screen people for signs of Alzheimer’s years before the first symptoms begin to appear. Yankner said doctors might be able to measure lithium levels in the cerebrospinal fluid or blood, or through brain imaging.

How our brains use lithium

In a healthy brain, lithium maintains the connections and communication lines that allow neurons to talk with one another. The metal also helps form the myelin that coats and insulates the communication lines and helps microglial cells clear cellular debris that can impede brain function.

“In normal aging mice,” Yankner said, “lithium promotes good memory function. In normal aging humans,” higher lithium levels also correspond to better memory function.

The depletion of lithium in the brain plays a role in most of the deterioration in several mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Loss of lithium accelerates the development of harmful clumps of the protein amyloid beta and tangles of the protein tau that resemble the structures found in people with Alzheimer’s. Amyloid plaques and tau tangles disrupt communication between nerve cells.

The plaques in turn undermine lithium by trapping it, weakening its ability to help the brain function.

Lithium depletion is involved in other destructive processes of Alzheimer’s: decay of brain synapses, damage to the myelin that protects nerve fibers and reduced capacity of microglial cells to break down amyloid plaques.

Lithium’s pervasive role comes despite the fact that our brains contain only a small amount of it. After examining more than 500 human brains from Rush and other brain banks, Yankner’s team discovered the naturally occurring lithium in the brain is 1,000 times less than the lithium provided in medications to treat bipolar disorder.

Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who was not involved in the study, called it “very exciting,” especially when many in the field, including her own lab, have focused on genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

“But clearly genetic risk factors are not the only things,” said Tsai, who is also Picower professor of neuroscience. “There are a lot of people walking around carrying these risk genes, but they are not affected by Alzheimer’s disease. I feel this study provides a very important piece of the puzzle.”

Pathways for treatment

Alzheimer’s treatments mostly help to manage symptoms and slow the decline it causes in thinking and functioning. Aducanumab, lecanemab, and donanemab, all lab-made antibodies, bind to the harmful amyloid plaques and help remove them.

Donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine ― all in the class of medications known as cholinesterase inhibitors ― work by replenishing a chemical messenger called acetylcholine, which is diminished in Alzheimer’s. Acetylcholine plays an important role in memory, muscle movement and attention.

Yankner and his team found that when they gave otherwise healthy mice a reduced-lithium diet, the mice lost brain synapses and began to lose memory. “We found that when we administered lithium orotate to aging mice [that had] started losing their memory, the lithium orotate actually reverted their memory to the young adult, six-month level,” he said.

Lithium orotate helped the mice reduce production of the amyloid plaques and tau tangles, and allowed the microglial cells to remove the plaques much more effectively.

Yankner said one factor that might help lithium orotate reach clinical trials sooner is the small amount of the treatment needed, which could greatly reduce the risk of harmful side effects, such as kidney dysfunction and thyroid toxicity.

Aside from its potential in treating Alzheimer’s, Yankner said lithium orotate might also have implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, an area his lab is investigating.

“That needs to be rigorously examined,” he said. “But we’re looking at a whole slew of disorders.”

Oh - And BKjr Is A Fuckin' Idiot

Statens Serum Institut

Large Danish Study: No link between vaccines and autism or 49 other health conditions
A new Danish study finds no association between aluminum in childhood vaccines and 50 different health conditions, including autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The findings reaffirm the safety of Denmark’s childhood vaccination program.

An extensive new Danish register-based study - the largest of its kind - supports the safety of the national childhood immunization program. Analyzing data from over 1 million children, the study found no increased risk of autism, asthma, or autoimmune diseases in vaccinated children.

“Our results are reassuring. By analyzing data from more than one million Danish children, we found absolutely no indication that the very small amount of aluminum used in the childhood vaccination program increases the risk of 50 different health outcomes during childhood,” says Anders Hviid, Head of Department at Statens Serum Institut (SSI) and principal investigator on the study.

Aluminum, used as an adjuvant to enhance the immune response, has been a component in some vaccines since the 1930s.

Researchers from SSI used Denmark’s unique national health registers to follow children born between 1997 and 2018, investigating the associations between aluminum-containing vaccines and a total of 50 health outcomes - including asthma, allergies, autoimmune conditions, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

“This is the first study of this scale and with such comprehensive analyses, and it confirms the strong safety profile of the vaccines we’ve used for decades in Denmark,” says Anders Hviid.

The results are being published at a time of heightened international debate about vaccine safety which makes the Danish study highly relevant.

“In an era marked by widespread misinformation about vaccines, it is crucial to rely on solid scientific evidence. Large, population-based register studies like this one - tracking more than a million children over many years - is a bulwark against the politicization of health science which undermines public trust in vaccines. It is absolutely essential to distinguish real science from politically motivated campaigns - otherwise, it is the children who will end up paying the price,” says Anders Hviid.

Reference:

Andersson NW, Bech Svalgaard I, Hoffmann SS, et al. Aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and chronic diseases in childhood. A nationwide cohort study. Ann Intern Med. 15 July 2025. [Epub ahead of print]. doi:10.7326/ANNALS-25-00997

Facts about the study

• Researchers from Statens Serum Institut (SSI) used Denmark’s unique health registers to analyze data from more than 1 million Danish children born between 1997 and 2018 to investi-gate potential long-term health effects of aluminum-containing vaccines.
• The study examined 50 different conditions and found no statistical association between aluminum content in vaccines and increased risk of developing autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma, or allergic conditions such as hay fever and food allergies.
• The study has just been published in the prestigious medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Source: Statens Serum Institut (SSI)

Today's Nerds

Bless you, nerds.

A Doctor Speaks

Quackery Update

There's no such thing as "Alternative Medicine".

If a claim or a remedy or a therapy or a product has been thoroughly tested, studied, debated, peer-reviewed, published, and approved, then it's not alternative medicine anymore. It's just medicine.

Everything else is either hypothesis or flat-out quackery.

From a year ago:

5 months ago:

Today's Debunkment

Some History

Freedom House Ambulance Service was the first emergency medical service in the United States to be staffed by paramedics with medical training beyond basic first aid.

Founded in 1967 to serve the predominantly black Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was staffed entirely by African Americans.

Freedom House Ambulance Service broke medical ground by training its personnel to previously unheard-of standards of emergency medical care for patients en route to hospitals.

The paramedic training and ambulance design standards pioneered in the Freedom House Ambulance Service would set the standard for emergency care nationally and even internationally.

On Stupid

Two days ago, I went in for the COVID booster I should've gotten 3 months ago, and as the nurse was entering my info into the records system, she noticed I was behind on other vaccinations as well.

So I got 5 jabs all at once. COVID, flu, pneumonia, tentanus (every ten years - I didn't know that), and pertussis.

Pertussis. Whooping cough. We're having to inoculate old people against whooping cough now because dumbass anti-vaxxers are convinced there's something wrong with the vaccines, so they're refusing to get the shot for their kids.

Sometimes, I just hate people.

(I felt like shit most of the day yesterday, but I seem to be in fine fettle today, thank you very much)

Anyway, here's a new guy talking about how Stupid can be more destructive than Evil.

Dunning Kruger is confirmed.

Today's Debunkment

• Aspartame is not carcinogenic
• Raw milk is not OK
• There's no mercury in vaccines
• Vaccines don't cause autism
• GMOs are everywhere, they've been around forever, and they're not harmful
• Parabens and aluminum salts in your deodorant aren't carcinogenic
• Pro-biotics supplements are junk
• Pre-biotics are just fiber
• Anti-vax conspiracy fantasies are stupid and dangerous
• Ozone therapy is bunk
• Sweating doesn't detox - that's what your liver, lungs, kidneys, and intestines are for
• Alkaline water / the alkaline diet are bunk
• In general, supplements are bunk
• There's no link between sugar and cancer
• BPA levels in products and the general environment are not high - and they're rapidly filtered out and excreted
• Sun screen is good
• Presence of toxic metalloids in tampons is wildly overblown
• There's no such thing as "alternative medicine". Clinicians are not hiding anything from you - there are no secrets of the ancients, lost to the ages.
• Cancer rates in young people are not "skyrocketing"
• Citric acid is not the black mold of your favorite homeowner's nightmare
• Don't sweat Lyme Disease
• Leaky Gut is not a real thing
• High fructose corn syrup is no worse than honey
• Cell phones don't emit the kind of radiation that can cause disease
• Underwire bras don't contribute to breast cancer
• You need fiber - carnivore diets are not good long-term

Overheard

Did you hear about the man

who went to the ER

because he was in dire need

of surgery on his balls,

but the doctors had to consult

their lawyers before

saving his life

and then he died?

Yeah, me neither.

Nobody has.

Ever.

Ape, Heal Thyself

Chimpanzees seen self-medicating with healing plants when sick or injured

The chimps sought out unappetizing plants with medicinal but little nutritional value, scientists said. The findings could be a pathway to novel human medicines.

The chimpanzee was sick. It had diarrhea and tapeworms — not unusual for a wild chimpanzee in the Budongo Forest of Uganda. What intrigued the watching research team was what the ape did about it.

Soon after its symptoms developed, the male traveled with two others away from the community’s home to a site in the forest with a particular type of tree. It collected some dead wood from the Alstonia boonei and chewed it. The plant has long been used in traditional medicine, and when the scientists tested it, they confirmed it had high antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. The chimp made a full recovery.

The chimp’s behavior was one of many instances observed over eight months that suggest chimpanzees could be using the forest as a natural drugstore. The study, published Thursday in the journal PLOS One, was carried out by a team led by Elodie Freymann of the University of Oxford and Fabien Schultz of Neubrandenburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, which found that chimpanzees were consuming a variety of plants with medicinal effects but little other nutritional value, often when they had a health issue such as an injury or a parasite.

The findings offered strong support for “novel self-medicative behaviors in wild chimpanzees,” the researchers wrote, adding that further study of the animals’ behavior could “benefit our own species, potentially leading to the discovery of novel human medicines.”

The next area of investigation will be the “most interesting plant extracts” consumed by the chimpanzees, Schultz said in an email. There are “lots of ‘ifs,’” he said, but theoretically, “one day the knowledge of chimpanzees could save human lives.”

He was particularly interested in the potential application of the chimps’ go-to plants in addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria and chronic inflammatory diseases — though he cautioned that there is a long road between this study and any possible drug breakthroughs.

The team observed two chimpanzee communities in the Budongo Forest for four months each. They tracked what the great apes ate and analyzed components of 13 plant species that seemed wholly unappetizing to a chimpanzee, such as bark and resin, to determine whether the materials had healing effects.

“Pharmacological results suggest that Budongo chimpanzees consume several species with potent medicinal properties,” the authors wrote.

Those struggling the most with parasites — something the scientists ascertained through testing their feces — had eaten plant material with the strongest antibacterial properties. An injured chimpanzee had eaten a fern with anti-inflammatory effects that was otherwise rarely consumed by the groups. All plant species, when tested in a laboratory, inhibited bacterial growth of E. coli, and some had been found in previous studies to have cancer-fighting or analgesic properties.

The authors noted that 11 of the 13 plant species had recorded uses in traditional medicine.

The researchers were surprised at the range of the ailments the chimps turned to plants for — and by the plants’ potency. “Maybe it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise,” Freymann said in an email, “because the chimpanzees are incredibly smart and it makes perfect sense they would have figured out by now which plants can help them when ill or injured.”

She said the research showed it was “highly unlikely” the chimpanzees were eating the medicinal plants coincidentally as part of their diet. “In many of these cases, the ill or injured chimps sought out these resources when no other member of their group did,” she said.

The study adds to a body of research that suggests some animals may use plants or insects to self-medicate. Our closest cousins, the apes, have often played a starring role in this field, called zoopharmacognosy.

Last month, scientists published their observation in the journal Scientific Reports of an orangutan in Indonesia applying the juice and chewed-up leaves of a plant known for its medicinal effects to an injury on its face — which then healed without signs of infection. Two years ago, a different study of chimpanzees, in the Loango National Park in Gabon, said the animals had been seen repeatedly applying insects to wounds.

Isabelle Laumer, a primatologist and cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany who was the orangutan report’s lead author but was not involved in the PLOS One study, said in an interview that the new study has contributed “really important findings” that opened up avenues for further research.

“It’s always very fascinating to find out that our closest relatives are showing behaviors that we humans also show,” she said. “I think this study, again, points towards the similarities that we share.”

The authors of the PLOS One study called for strong conservation efforts to allow the continuation of such research, and to explore its potential benefits to humans in finding plants with medicinal properties. “It is imperative that we urgently prioritize the preservation of our wild forest pharmacies as well as our primate cousins who inhabit them,” they said.

Oh My Achin' Head

A high school buddy I played ball with died of dementia a few years ago. He was our quarterback, and we looked after him pretty good, so he didn't take a lot of punishment on offense. But he played safety too, and while I don't remember him getting slammed all that much, there's always that shitty little voice in the back of my mind telling me, "You're next, Mr Headbutt."

In case you didn't notice -

at a certain point, there's no escape

Collective Force of Head Hits, Not Just the Number of Them, Increases Odds of C.T.E.

The largest study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy to date found that the cumulative force of head hits absorbed by players in their careers is the best predictor of future brain disease.

When Jeffrey Vlk played running back in high school in the 1990s and then safety in college, he took and delivered countless tackles during full-contact football practices. Hitting was a mainstay, as were injuries, including concussions.

When he became a coach at Buffalo Grove High School outside Chicago in 2005, Vlk did what he had been taught: He had his players hit and tackle in practices to “toughen them up.”

By the time he became head coach in 2016, though, he saw that many of his players were so banged up from a week of hitting in practice that they missed games or were more susceptible to being injured in those games.

So, starting in 2019, Vlk eliminated full-contact practices. Players wore shoulder pads once a week, on Wednesday, which he called contact day. That’s when they hit tackle bags and crash pads, and wrapped up teammates but did not throw them to the ground. Vlk said no starting player had been injured at his practices in four years.

“Those types of injuries can stay with you for a long time,” he said, “and knowing that I’m keeping the kids safe, not just in our program, but beyond the program, is reason enough to go this route.”

Vlk’s approach to limiting the number of hits players take has been spreading slowly in the football world, where much of the effort has focused on avoiding and treating concussions, which often have observable symptoms and are tracked by sports leagues.

But researchers have for years posited that the more hits to the head a player receives — even subconcussive ones, which are usually not tracked — the more likely he is to develop cognitive and neurological problems later in life.

A new study published on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Communications added a critical wrinkle: A football player’s chances of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., are related to the number of head impacts absorbed, but also to the cumulative impact of all those hits.

Collective Force of Head Hits Increases Odds of CTE, Study Says - The New York Times
The study, the largest to look at the causes of C.T.E. to date, used data published in 34 studies that tracked the number and magnitude of head hits measured by football helmet sensors. Using the data, which went back 20 years, the scientists estimated the number and force of head hits absorbed by 631 former football players who donated their brains to studies overseen by researchers at Boston University.

The paper tried to address one of the most persistent challenges for brain trauma researchers: identifying what aspects of head hits contribute most to C.T.E. They looked at the number of hits to the head, the number of years playing football, the force of those hits and other factors.

The best predictor of brain disease later in life, the study found, was the cumulative force of the head hits absorbed by the players over the course of their careers, not the number of diagnosed concussions.

“We’re now getting a better understanding of what causes C.T.E. pathology, but we’re also getting a better understanding of what’s not causing C.T.E. pathology,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study. “And in this case, it’s the largest study of C.T.E. pathology ever, and concussions were basically noise.”

Of the 631 brains examined, 451 players, or 71 percent, were found to have C.T.E., while 180 did not. The players who were estimated to have absorbed the greatest cumulative force had the worst forms of C.T.E., which has been associated with symptoms including memory loss, impulsive behavior, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Eric Nauman, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the study, said the results strengthened the idea that an accumulation of subconcussive hits, rather than concussions, was the driving force behind long-term cognitive decline.

The latest data “seems to support the idea that, yes, all these hits matter, they all add up,” Dr. Nauman said. “If you accumulate damage faster than the body can repair it, now you’ve got a problem.”

He said the analysis pointed the way toward obvious changes that could make football safer, like the elimination of hitting in practices and the development of helmets that absorb more impact, especially to the back of the head.

Dr. Nauman noted that the new study included brains of players with and without the disease, sparing it from the common concern that the researchers looked only at the most damaged brains.

It also found links between the estimated number and types of hits players sustained during their careers and their health many years later, a factor Dr. Nauman said would make it more difficult for detractors to argue that players had possibly suffered unknown injuries in the decades after they stopped playing football that caused later cognitive problems.

Dr. Nauman said the new research was still bound by limitations. The study counted all of the head impacts detected by helmet sensors, except for those caused by jostling or incidental motion. But previous research has suggested that the most important hits appeared to be those above a certain threshold, a distinction the study was not able to make.

Because the N.F.L. has not published its helmet sensor data, the study used college sensor data as a proxy for professional players.

Helmets have improved in recent years, and it is likely that players whose careers predate the improvements absorbed more of the impact from any given hit. But football players in decades past were on average smaller and slower than those playing today, making any given hit less forceful, Dr. Nauman said.

“That certainly is a caveat, but it’s not something that would make me think the basic conclusions are wrong,” he said.

Joseph J. Crisco, a professor at Brown University who helped devise a sensor used in Riddell helmets, said the study tried to overcome a basic challenge — that researchers had not tracked how many hits the brain donors had accumulated during their careers.

Rather, the study used helmet sensor data from a more recent set of players to estimate the number and force of head impacts for the older players, based on what positions they played, at what levels of the sport and for how long.

While studies using players’ actual lifetime head impacts were needed, he said, the findings suggest that “the players that are getting hit the hardest and most often are more likely to have C.T.E. down the road.”

Steve Rowson, who studies helmet impacts and concussion risk at Virginia Tech, said the study’s emphasis on the force and number of hits that players sustain fits with how scientists understand brain injuries.

The odds of developing C.T.E. increase exponentially with more force to the head
This table shows the increased risk of developing C.T.E. for each additional year played compared with someone who played only two years of youth football. Players who absorb more head hits, like linemen who play for many years, are at higher risk for the disease.

Researchers have managed to pinpoint some factors that explain different players’ exposure to head impacts, he said. For example, he said, linemen are most often hit on the fronts of their helmets, while quarterbacks are more likely to suffer severe impacts to the backs of theirs.

But, Dr. Rowson said, it would be a mistake for people to think that they could now use the findings to predict anyone’s chances of long-term cognitive problems.

“What I don’t think we can do right now is look at an individual and really get a good idea of their head impact exposure relative to another,” he said, “because there’s this huge difference person to person that we can’t quite account for.”

The study notes that future research should examine different thresholds for counting hits, an advancement that Dr. Rowson said was important. Some head impacts, he said, are mild enough that the brain can probably tolerate them. But at exactly what point the impacts become damaging is not clear, he said.

“Not all impacts are created equal,” he said. “Trying to figure out which impacts are the most important, I think, could really help this kind of analysis.”

Today's Nerdy Stuff

 

Note: "Nerdy" doesn't (necessarily) mean a little light comedy at the smart guys' expense, or too densely complicated to register in a normal person's brain.

Onward -

On the surface, information like this piece in NYT leads me to think:

"Great - while others are applying it in ways that could solve some pretty big problems, what're we doing with AI here in USAmerica Inc? ChatBots that get pissy if an interviewer asks a challenging question."

But that sells us a bit short. New tech often starts out in a kind of game form. We play with it to see what all we can get it to do. That gives the base product a good and thorough workout, and gathers important user-supplied feedback so the thing can either become much more robust, or be exposed as too deeply flawed to pursue it outside of the lab.

It does bother me that a dog-ass dictatorship like Orbon's Turkey is out front making some pretty amazing advances with it, even though it's been on the radar here for years.

All that said, I really don't care where it comes from, I'll take what sounds like a win on the good side of things, as I'm sure DARPA (and the Turkish Ministry of Defense, et al) are very busily trying to co-opt it as the next logical step towards Skynet.

Using A.I. to Detect Breast Cancer That Doctors Miss

Hungary has become a major testing ground for A.I. software to spot cancer, as doctors debate whether the technology will replace them in medical jobs.

Two radiologists had previously said the X-ray did not show any signs that the patient had breast cancer. But Dr. Ambrózay was looking closely at several areas of the scan circled in red, which artificial intelligence software had flagged as potentially cancerous.

“This is something,” she said. She soon ordered the woman to be called back for a biopsy, which is taking place within the next week.

Advancements in A.I. are beginning to deliver breakthroughs in breast cancer screening by detecting the signs that doctors miss. So far, the technology is showing an impressive ability to spot cancer at least as well as human radiologists, according to early results and radiologists, in what is one of the most tangible signs to date of how A.I. can improve public health.

Hungary, which has a robust breast cancer screening program, is one of the largest testing grounds for the technology on real patients. At five hospitals and clinics that perform more than 35,000 screenings a year, A.I. systems were rolled out starting in 2021 and now help to check for signs of cancer that a radiologist may have overlooked. Clinics and hospitals in the United States, Britain and the European Union are also beginning to test or provide data to help develop the systems.

A.I. usage is growing as the technology has become the center of a Silicon Valley boom, with the release of chatbots like ChatGPT showing how A.I. has a remarkable ability to communicate in humanlike prose — sometimes with worrying results. Built off a similar form used by chatbots that is modeled on the human brain, the breast cancer screening technology shows other ways that A.I. is seeping into everyday life.

Widespread use of the cancer detection technology still faces many hurdles, doctors and A.I. developers said. Additional clinical trials are needed before the systems can be more widely adopted as an automated second or third reader of breast cancer screens, beyond the limited number of places now using the technology. The tool must also show it can produce accurate results on women of all ages, ethnicities and body types. And the technology must prove it can recognize more complex forms of breast cancer and cut down on false-positives that are not cancerous, radiologists said.

The A.I. tools have also prompted a debate about whether they will replace human radiologists, with makers of the technology facing regulatory scrutiny and resistance from some doctors and health institutions. For now, those fears appear overblown, with many experts saying the technology will be effective and trusted by patients only if it is used in partnership with trained doctors.

And ultimately, A.I. could be lifesaving, said Dr. László Tabár, a leading mammography educator in Europe who said he was won over by the technology after reviewing its performance in breast cancer screening from several vendors.

“I’m dreaming about the day when women are going to a breast cancer center and they are asking, ‘Do you have A.I. or not?’” he said.

Hundreds of images a day

In 2016, Geoff Hinton, one of the world’s leading A.I. researchers, argued the technology would eclipse the skills of a radiologist within five years.

“I think that if you work as a radiologist, you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon,” he told The New Yorker in 2017. “You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.”

Mr. Hinton and two of his students at the University of Toronto built an image recognition system that could accurately identify common objects like flowers, dogs and cars. The technology at the heart of their system — called a neural network — is modeled on how the human brain processes information from different sources. It is what is used to identify people and animals in images posted to apps like Google Photos, and allows Siri and Alexa to recognize the words people speak. Neural networks also drove the new wave of chatbots like ChatGPT.

Many A.I. evangelists believed such technology could easily be applied to detect illness and disease, like breast cancer in a mammogram. In 2020, there were 2.3 million breast cancer diagnoses and 685,000 deaths from the disease, according to the World Health Organization.

But not everyone felt replacing radiologists would be as easy as Mr. Hinton predicted. Peter Kecskemethy, a computer scientist who co-founded Kheiron Medical Technologies, a software company that develops A.I. tools to assist radiologists detect early signs of cancer, knew the reality would be more complicated.

Mr. Kecskemethy grew up in Hungary spending time at one of Budapest’s largest hospitals. His mother was a radiologist, which gave him a firsthand look at the difficulties of finding a small malignancy within an image. Radiologists often spend hours every day in a dark room looking at hundreds of images and making life-altering decisions for patients.

“It’s so easy to miss tiny lesions,” said Dr. Edith Karpati, Mr. Kecskemethy’s mother, who is now a medical product director at Kheiron. “It’s not possible to stay focused.”

Mr. Kecskemethy, along with Kheiron’s co-founder, Tobias Rijken, an expert in machine learning, said A.I. should assist doctors. To train their A.I. systems, they collected more than five million historical mammograms of patients whose diagnoses were already known, provided by clinics in Hungary and Argentina, as well as academic institutions, such as Emory University. The company, which is in London, also pays 12 radiologists to label images using special software that teaches the A.I. to spot a cancerous growth by its shape, density, location and other factors.

From the millions of cases the system is fed, the technology creates a mathematical representation of normal mammograms and those with cancers. With the ability to look at each image in a more granular way than the human eye, it then compares that baseline to find abnormalities in each mammogram.

Last year, after a test on more than 275,000 breast cancer cases, Kheiron reported that its A.I. software matched the performance of human radiologists when acting as the second reader of mammography scans. It also cut down on radiologists’ workloads by at least 30 percent because it reduced the number of X-rays they needed to read. In other results from a Hungarian clinic last year, the technology increased the cancer detection rate by 13 percent because more malignancies were identified.

Dr. Tabár, whose techniques for reading a mammogram are commonly used by radiologists, tried the software in 2021 by retrieving several of the most challenging cases of his career in which radiologists missed the signs of a developing cancer. In every instance, the A.I. spotted it.

“I was shockingly surprised at how good it was,” Dr. Tabár said. He said that he did not have any financial connections to Kheiron when he first tested the technology and has since received an advisory fee for feedback to improve the systems. Systems he tested from other A.I. companies, including Lunit Insight from South Korea and Vara from Germany, have also delivered encouraging detection results, he said.

Proof in Hungary

Kheiron’s technology was first used on patients in 2021 in a small clinic in Budapest called MaMMa Klinika. After a mammogram is completed, two radiologists review it for signs of cancer. Then the A.I. either agrees with the doctors or flags areas to check again.

Across five MaMMa Klinika sites in Hungary, 22 cases have been documented since 2021 in which the A.I. identified a cancer missed by radiologists, with about 40 more under review.

“It’s a huge breakthrough,” said Dr. András Vadászy, the director of MaMMa Klinika, who was introduced to Kheiron through Dr. Karpati, Mr. Kecskemethy’s mother. “If this process will save one or two lives, it will be worth it.”

Kheiron said the technology worked best alongside doctors, not in lieu of them. Scotland’s National Health Service will use it as an additional reader of mammography scans at six sites, and it will be in about 30 breast cancer screening sites operated by England’s National Health Service by the end of the year. Oulu University Hospital in Finland plans to use the technology as well, and a bus will travel around Oman this year to perform breast cancer screenings using A.I.

“An A.I.-plus-doctor should replace doctor alone, but an A.I. should not replace the doctor,” Mr. Kecskemethy said.

The National Cancer Institute has estimated that about 20 percent of breast cancers are missed during screening mammograms.

Constance Lehman, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and chief of breast imaging and radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, urged doctors to keep an open mind.

“We are not irrelevant,” she said, “but there are tasks that are better done with computers.”

At Bács-Kiskun County Hospital outside Budapest, Dr. Ambrózay said she had initially been skeptical of the technology — but was quickly won over. She pulled up the X-ray of a 58-year-old woman with a tiny tumor spotted by the A.I. that Dr. Ambrózay had a hard time seeing.

The A.I. saw something, she said, “that seemed to appear out of nowhere.”

The New Medicine

You can poison 'em

You can cut 'em

You can burn 'em

You can pray over 'em

Medicine - the practice of medicine - was always about managing symptoms in order to give the body a chance to fix itself. Because three-and-a-half billion years of evolution has made bodies pretty damed good at fixing themselves.

That does not mean the science has stood still, and that in the end we're on our own. The MedNerds have done phenomenal things in terms of attacking health problems at the root cause level - coming at the problem from all angles - prevention, mitigation, remediation or whatever.

Now we're looking at brand new ways of doing things.

mRNA therapies hold promise for being a huge step towards the magic bullet. They can be "programmed" to teach the body how to defend itself better with the tools already on board, but the really really really big one: flipping the switches that need to be flipped so the body can manufacture and replace broken pieces, or astoundingly, "wake up" the cells that weren't active enough to make whatever parts some of us weren't lucky enough to be born with.

I get a very tingly feeling when Sci-Fi concepts start to become reality.

"I believe in miracles - if you dream it - it can be done"

Melissa Moore - Moderna's Chief Scientific Officer

Melissa Moore's TED Talk

Here's that chart

(click here for an explodable look at it)

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

The political commentators can't even get the political commentary right - their field of study.

When the subject is vaccination, why the fuck would you take their word over doctors?

Today's Tweet

I thought Steve McQueen killed this thing.

A robot made of magnetic slime could be deployed inside the body to perform tasks such as retrieving objects swallowed by accident.https://t.co/EYpnx56vNO pic.twitter.com/zA3hMO80xQ

— New Scientist (@newscientist) March 31, 2022